GIFT OF BENJAMIN GILL SERMONS AND ADDRESSES BENJAMIN GILL c^JL^u PREFATORY NOTE T the regular meeting of the General Faculty September 12, 1912, "it was voted," in the words of the minutes of that meeting, "on mo- tion by Dr. E. W. Runkle, that a committee of five be appointed to arrange for the issuing of a memorial volume commemorative of the long, faithful, and devoted service of Dr. Benjamin Gill, late Chaplain of the College and Professor of Latin and Greek. The President appointed as such committee : Professor Pattee, for the Faculty ; the Reverend J. McK. Reiley, Dr. Gill's pastor; Mrs. Runkle, representing the Woman's Club; Mr. D. F. Kapp, representing the vil- lage ; Mr. S. K. Hostetter, representing the business con- nections." At the first meeting of the committee Mr. S. K. Hostetter was elected Secretary and Business Manager. Since it had no funds at its disposal, the committee de- cided upon a subscription volume to be sold at the bare cost of manufacture and advertising. It was decided that it would prove more acceptable to the friends of Dr. Gill who would purchase the volume if it were made a collection of some of his best writings, rather than a memorial work with tribute and resolutions. Professor Pattee was accordingly elected as editor. The papers of Dr. Gill given over to the committee consist of the 148 sermons preached before the students 270235 of the college between the years 1899 and 1911, a num- ber of sermons preached elsewhere during the period, and various papers and addresses given before literary societies, at school commencements, and on other occa- sions. The sermons are in many ways remarkable. They were all of them written out in full with extreme care and dated and numbered. They were written always with a view to the needs and the attainments of the students for whom they were intended. How broad an area of subjects they covered one can see by consulting the appendix at the end of this book. They reflect in a remarkable way the spirit of the college life during the era they cover. They are colored often by some specific event in the college week which had just passed or by the season of the year or by some happening in the state or national life. Just before the great football game he preaches on "The Ath- letic Spirit"; at the time of the deplorable college strike he speaks on "Come, Let us Reason Together"; at the beginning of each year he gives always sound advice and holds up the highest standard, striking always what he hopes to be the key-note of the year. His illustrations, many of them, are taken from the life and the environ- ment of the college. It is a series of sermons that is a part of the splendid history of the college and as such should be jealously guarded in its most sacred archives. In seeking a few specimens of Dr. Gill's work for reproduction in this volume, the editor has held before himself three requirements. First, he has sought those selections that are most finished and most literary; second, he has sought those parts of his work which would be most redolent of the author's genial personality; and third, he has tried as far as possible to preserve addresses that are a part of the history of the college, such as, for instance, the Prayers, the memorial address for President Atherton, and the last sermon delivered in the old chapel before the whole student body. To all who have helped in any way to make the volume possible, to the Alumni of the Pennsylvania State College and others who have helped with their subscrip- tions, and to the friends who have in one way or another made the work possible the committee wishes to express its heartfelt thanks. That the book may be thought worthy of the memory of the man whom it tries to honor is the sincere wish of THE COMMITTEE. State College, Pa., March i, 1913. CONTENTS Part I. In Memoriam I. Benjamin Gill, A.M., D.D., by Erwin W. Run- kle. II. Benjamin Gill : An Appreciation, by Fred Lewis Pattee. III. A Tribute to Benjamin Gill, by C. T. Winchester. Part II. Sermons and Addresses I. Glimpses of Travel. II. Fanny Burney and Her Times. III. A Brotherhood of Culture. IV. Values Inherent to Friendship. V. The Preciousness of the Bible. VI. How to Spend My Sundays. VII. Old Home Week. VIII. The Problems of Life Solved by Worship. IX. Prayers. X. Of What Use is an Old Man Anyhow ? XL Academic Foundations. XII. A Man is Worth What He Can Think. XIII Success Through Monotony. XIV. Moulded by an Idea. XV. Honoring One's Name. XVI. Consulting Our Fears. XVII Some Practical Bearings of a Belief in the Future Life. Appendix. PART I. IN MEMORIAM IN MEMORIAM I. BENJAMIN GILL, A.M., D.D. ERWIN W. RUNKLE Institutions like our own have two histories, one written in buildings, the other in men. The one is ex- pressed in external changes, the other in scholarly lives. In our estimates, the former, openly avowed or tactly im- plied, frequently overshadows the latter, but sober reflec- tion brings us back to the moral worth of personalities. Adapting a sentiment of Emerson's, we then affirm that "institutions are but the lengthening shadows of men." In the same sense that Rugby was Arnold, are our Amer- can Colleges the sum of character forces, the personel of administrator and scholar. No one doubts that the common suffrages of our College Community assign to Dr. Benjamin Gill a con- spicuous place among these permanent character forces. This admission quickens our interest in a sketch of his life, and inspires a common tribute of affection and esteem. Benjamin Gill was born July n, 1843, in the woolen manufacturing district of Yorkshire, in Northern Eng- land. He was placed in a factory at the early age of eight years, where he worked half time, going to school the other half. In these schools, the one no less than the other, he learned the lessons of "industry and faith- fulness," the terms with which he loved best to charac- terize his own life. When he was eleven years old, the family emigrated to America, locating in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Dr. Gill grew to young manhood. Bearing his share in the burden of establishing the family in the new world, our subject was immediately placed in a cotton factory, and later apprenticed to a boot-maker near Worcester. Factory conditions were severe in those days, the click of the machinery beginning at a quarter of five, and con- tinuing, (with only forty-five minutes for dinner), until seven-thirty. Studying as opportunity offered at night or in the shop, attending lyceum lectures in Worcester, and reading books from its Public Library, he came to have an unalterable ambition for higher education. Giv- ing over his apprenticeship, he returned to Worcester, but being a minor, was obliged to aid the family fortunes by working in a machine shop. The war, too, broke out, and this shop with many others was transformed into a manufactory of gun fittings under contracts from the Springfield Arsenal. Thus the sterner duties of war de- layed but did not destroy his love of books and learning. When twenty-one years of age, Dr. Gill had a capi- tal of but thirty dollars, earned by working overtime ; his real fortune lay in a fixed determination to secure a good education. In March, 1864, he entered the academy at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and two years later, Wes- leyan University, graduating with the class of 1870. Those six years were years of struggle and sacrifice which try men's souls. He supported himself by toiling in the machine shop during the summer, by teaching school, and finally by preaching, in addition to his regu- lar college work. However, friends came to his aid, else the strain would have been too great for even his indom- itable zeal. 10 Dr. Gill chose the ministry as his profession, and upon the completion of his college course, he joined the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and "was settled" at Westboro, about thirty miles from Boston. He was married in 1870 to Lucy Eleanor Whitman, whom he first met at the academy. A happy, Christian home was established in which she shared the burdens until her death in 1897. To all outward appearances, Dr. Gill was to follow the life of a New England parson, bringing lessons of the joy of sacrifice, the struggle of victory, to the people among whom his life was to be cast. But fate had mark- ed a path of yet greater usefulness. He was to instruct youth, to teach teachers, to inspire those who would later carry the message of manly work in the world into all avenues of life. The opportunity came in the form of an invitation in 1872 to teach at his old academy at Wilbra- ham, He began by teaching, to quote his own words, "a little Latin, some very elementary algebra, and arithme- tic." In 1875, he was placed in charge of Greek and History in the Academy, and during the seventeen years of his connection, shared with the Principal of the School the labors of administration at home and abroad. It would be no fling of an arrow at a venture to affirm he taught his pupils many things not in text-books or curriculum; and the spontaneous tributes of these students of his, many of whom occupy commanding posi- tions in business and professional life, bear noble wit- ness. Moreover, Dr. Gill was a public-spirited citizen, taking an active part in town meetings, serving on school committees, and ministering to the community liberally. 11 In 1892 he accepted the Professorship of Latin at The Pennsylvania State College, and as opportunity and duty called, he later became Professor of Greek and Latin, Dean of the School of Language and Literature, and College Chaplain. Since 1899 Dr. Gill has been in charge of the Chapel Services, himself speaking on alternate Sundays. A change in conducting the morning chapel exercises was made in 1905, since which time, he has led the service. Let who may, think these light tasks and duties. The most inspiring, the most critical, the most strength-con- suming audience is a college audience. Would that some pen might marshall the fruits of these labors in the lives of Penn State men. In 1909 Dr. Gill resigned the Deanship of the School of Languages and Literature (which later was merged in the School of Liberal Arts), and gave all his energy to the work of teacher and College Chaplain. He lectured many times before Schools and Colleges, wrote for pub- lications, besides ministering in countless ways and on countless occasions to the varying needs and changes of a college community. In the stress of affliction, in over- whelming sadness, in bounty of joy, (and our college community has had its due of such), both student and co-worker have turned naturally to Dr. Gill for the ap- propriate word, for healing consolation, for the common touch of human brotherhood. The friend of all, he has always given his best to his friends. Academic honors and responsibilities were his throughout his work. He represented the College at various academic celebrations and educational meetings. He was a member of Psi Upsilon Fraternity, of Phi 12 Beta Kappa, and of Phi Kappa Phi. He was the Treas- urer General, and one of the Regents of the last named organization since its beginning, closely identified with its policies and active in its growth. He is the father of the Literary Club, an organization of the Faculty of The Pennsylvania State College, which since 1895 has had a vigorous life. In 1902 Wesleyan University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He repeat- edly sat at the "head of the board" at Wesleyan banquets, and upon Commencement occasions had the honor of dis- tributing the prizes of his Alma Mater. For thirty-nine years Dr. Gill's work as a teacher has been almost continuous. He travelled in Europe during the summer of 1882; and in 1905 spent the vacation in California and the Northwest. In 1907 he was urged to accept a brief vacation, and he again travelled on the Pacific Coast. In the same year, he was married to Ellen Urania Clark, of Cambridge, Massachusetts , a teacher of literature, a woman of rare culture and attain- ments. To characterize the personality of Professor Gill, seems like a superfluous task. Such terms as geniality, friendliness, unselfishness, faithfulness, liberality, crowd one's mind as descriptive of Dr. Gill's personal life. He was known by everyone, the village child, the laborer, the co-worker; and respected most when best known. His life enshrined Tennyson's noble words : "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." His philosophy of life was formed early in his teach- ing career. He determined to put his whole life into the daily class-room work. He dedicated his best energies 13 to the elimination of what was wrong and untrue in young minds, and to the inculcation of what was right and true. He made his class-room a workshop of char- acter and learning, and tried to better the daily products that came from these tasks. He was always enthusiastic on the subject of the Classics, particularly the Greek. He believed, as do many of our greatest teachers, that there is still "no better drill ground for a young, growing mind than an average page of Latin or Greek." Greater than all else, he was a prophet of the larger view of things. He believed in the essential resasonable- ness of the Christian life, as a life of service ; and his de- votion and faithfulness in little as well as great duties, developed a character which bespoke immortality. Let- ters written, as it were, at the very brink of the grave have the spiritual vigor and potency of the more abun- dant life, the life everlasting. As young in spirit as when he began teaching, open- minded toward the newest and best that each new day brought, giving his best, even when strength waned ; the one ardent desire that found expression in every heart was many years of usefulness and blessing. Such desire too will be realized, for the influence of Dr. Gill, the genius of his friendship, his scholarly, manly outlook upon life; his moral faithfulness and religious courage still live to bless The Pennsylvania State College. Dr. Gill died on Sunday, February nth, 1912, at the Church Home and Infirmary, Baltimore, Maryland. He was tenderly laid to rest at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, February I4th, amid surroundings that be- tokened eloquently the many-sided affection and esteem which continuously crowned his life. 14 I can conceive no more fitting conclusion to this sketch than the tribute paid Dr. Gill by him whose silent form rests within the shadow of the Auditorium, in which the services and ministries of both lives so often blended : "Faithful Friend; a Wise and Patient Counselor; an Exemplar of the Best Standards of Manly College Life and Learning. 'Integer vitae Scelerisque purus.' " An Address delivered at the Memorial Service at State College. II. BENJAMIN GILL: AN APPRECIATION BY FRED LEWIS PATTEE The services which Benjamin Gill rendered to The Pennsylvania State College were three-fold. First of all, he brought a genial personality, one that made friends easily and that inspired confidence quickly and held it permanently. His hearty laugh, his countenance beam- ing with fun, his inexhaustible store of wit and anecdotes made him welcome wherever he might go. Everybody knew him and everybody loved him. He was the prince of afterdinner speakers and the centre always of social gatherings. It was this power of compelling confidence, of win- ning friendship, and of holding it, of radiating sympathy, of entering actively into the lives of others, that made his greatest impress upon the student body of the college. I can do no better than quote from a letter written to Mrs. Gill, February I2th, 1912, by one of the students : "Dr. Gill was always very dear to me, and especially 15 so after the death of my father, for he seemed to take such a kindly interest in me, and smoothed out the diffi- cult places in his own dignified, unpretentious way, so that I have always felt indebted to him. His influence among the students I have always felt was not sufficiently known or appreciated. He had a kindly interest in all with whom he came in contact. In spirit he was somewhat of a boy himself and so could understand younger men ; and with them he was approachable. His keen sense of humor ever made him popular wherever he went. Occa- sionally Dr. Gill would talk with me about young men at the college in whom he had an especial interest, of which interest the individual concerned frequently had no knowledge. While he worked as an undercurrent, I am glad to say he had the courage of his convictions, and never hesitated to show on which side he stood when it was necessary to take a stand. His many years of ser- vice must stand as a tower of strength, and among those who knew him he will ever be held in the highest esteem. This is but a poor testimonial of his true value and posi- tion, but I wished to express it, for I knew it must be the viewpoint of many of the students whose good fortune it was to meet and to know your husband." And to those who worked nearer to him what a friend he was. How it lifted one to his best to receive letters from him with passages in them like this : "And again I hope we shall knuckle into another year not to think what we shall get out of it so much as what we shall do in it. Here's with you, dear old friend, here's with you for a life more solid than ever to all that is good and true." "Beloved, one thing is sure. If we sought the world over we might find a nobler salary, more privileges of 16 town or city, but should we find a cleaner and more in- telligent friendship? Should we find more inspiring out- look ? More chance to help ? I hardly think it. I have a feeling that here we instill into men the manhood of facing life and of taking it steadily and whole as Matthew Arnold says. Here is with you for another year to put more manhood into young men. It is a privilege. God grant we may not betray it." "Thank you for the dear note. Read carefully and slowly Ephesians 3: 14-21. That prayer is my prayer for you. God bless you, old boy, and hold you fast." The second service that Benjamin Gill rendered to the college was the bringing and the disseminating of an atmosphere of true culture. He was of the old school in the exactness and breadth of his knowledge of all that is best in the higher realms of man's thinking and feeling. He had read with careful study practically all of the lead- ing classics in the Greek and the Latin languages, and many of them he knew literally by heart. He was closely familiar with the German and its literature, he had some knowledge of Italian and Spanish, and he knew, as few of the present day know, the entire range of English Lit- erature. Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Thackery, Dickens, he read and reread until he knew them almost as he knew his Bible. No man ever read more than he. His letters are re- dolent of the beauties of his reading. Not once did he write without allusion to the great books with which he was in contact. "I am bathing my soul in Samuel Longfellow's Life of Henry W. Longfellow. It is a sweetly inspiring book. Like the Life and Letters of George Ticknor, it 17 gives one calm, and a more wholesome view of life and more unquestioning trust and faith." "I have bought several different volumes of prayers : Dr. Samuel Johnson's, Theodore Parker's, and a volume of prayers ancient and modern which I am reading with comfort and profit. I am just finishing Foster's Dickens and reading Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. I have read perhaps one hundred and fifty pages of Livy at odds and ends of time since term began. Mrs. Gill and I are reading Lockhart's Scott, and I have just finished after nearly a year Heroes and Hero Worship, Sartor, and The French Revolution. So you see I fire very scattering and loose where I please. Livy is wonderful when one gets the swing of him." "You ask how I am passing my vacation. Well, actively I assure you. My long vacations have always been times of enlarged study. I have in such times read much German and Greek particularly, and since I came out here, in Latin and in French. Knowledge is so vast. I want to compass some of it. The little short story of Balzac, Eugene Grandet is an absolute revela- tion. The power to build up a character, to see beauties and defects in character, to apply the microscope and the lance : the power to detail the setting of things ! Balzac is a wonder, a wonder! I have read since I wrote you Agesilaus, Hiero, Economics. Tuttle loaned me Sara- cinesca, San? Ilario, and Don Orsino. They are very strong indeed. Crawford has a royal imagination and strong passion." "I try to keep in close touch with those spirits who have enlightened the generations and kept up the tone and fibre of the race. The man who has within arm's 18 reach the best thoughts of Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, of Chateubriand, La- martine, Rousseau, Sand, Hugo, Bossuet but then why ennumerate? ought to be taken out and flogged if he grumbles. If I had my Bible and Whittier only I would be happy. How much more with all the unspeakable wealth of innumerable others ! All these boundless treas- ures paralyze me whenever I think of putting my own pen to paper. Blessed books! Blessed opportunity I have had to read them ! I am thankful for it all, God knows." During the last six months of his life, although racked almost constantly with pain, he read nearly the whole of Wordsworth and of Sophocles, much of Plato, and every morning a section from the Greek Testament. This element in the life of Dr. Gill had its effect upon the college. It made his teaching vital. His pupils drew ever from the living stream and never from the stagnant pool. And its effect overflowed his class-rooms and permeated the whole community. Wherever he went he carried with him an atmosphere of scholarship in its broadest sense, and of culture which was a constant re- buke to that modern spirit that tends to build upon the merely material for quick returns of mere material things. He added little to the published literature of his time, though for years he wrote constantly and volumi- nously. "My sixteen efforts at the college during the year," he once wrote me, "would make a good-sized octavo." All of his sermons, even his "talks" to the Epworth League and at prayer meetings, he wrote care- fully out, putting upon them a literary finish and a beauty 19 of style that makes them rank really as literature of dis- tinction. His great love of literature and his high criti- cal standards made him hesitate to offer work for publi- cation. At soul he was a poet. "If my power to write poetry," he once wrote me, "had been equal to my love of it, I should have excelled Shakespeare or Homer." If the poetic passages were culled from his letters and ser- mons they would make a rare anthology. He loved na- ture intensely. His letters often began with the setting of the season or a picture of the beauty of the day. Writing March 28 he says, "The elms have put out their little tassels and now are shyly starting their leaves. The warmth of the bluebird's note, the lyric fragment now and then of the song sparrow, the rat-tat-tat of the woodpecker, the robin with his chi-lop, chi-lop, chi-lop, chi-lee, make a variety of melody sufficient to scare away the tortures of rheumatism." And again: "Before the shadows envelop it I would say, old Tussey is in his white robe, the fields by Boalsburg are beautiful, the trees down the avenue are bare, but beau- tiful, so beautiful, as we know they are preparing to bloom and leaf again. 'And we, new rising from the tomb, In lustre brighter far shall shine in ever-during bloom, Safe from diseases and decline.' " The third service that Dr. Gill rendered the college came from his deep and rich religious life. For years he occupied the college pulpit on alternate Sundays. No other man in the history of State College preached so many times to the students, and his message was always 20 sane, always practical, and always inspiring. Narrow- ness and prejudice had no place in that clear atmosphere. He preached a free gospel from a free platform. He was tolerant as no other man I have ever known, and sympa- thetic, and human. He stood for helpfulness to all, in- dependent of race or creed ; and standing always thus he became a help to all. He took with tremendous seriousness his responsibility as leader of the religious life of the college. He gave his very best without stint of toil. A passage from one of his letters reveals just a hint of his methods : "My daily chapel : this year I am using the utmost care with it. I am making the most careful selections of scripture each day. Then I build up a prayer largely on some thought or thoughts in the selection and written out in full. This I commit to memory or familiarize myself with it." The whole atmosphere of his life was religious. He was saturated with the old hymns of the church, the Bible he had at his tongue's end, and those who were privileged to walk with him on sunny afternoons far into the country round about the college knew how inspiring- ly he could talk of the great leaders of the Christian church and the vital religious history of the wonderful century of which he had been a part. His faith was childlike. Though often shaken by doubtings and questionings which his active mind brought vividly before him, he never once doubted the reality of God and of his own personal relations to Jesus Christ. "My faith in God grows deeper and my hope in Christ was never more strong. I wish I lived the religi- 21 ous life as well as I know and have been taught. But He understands and forgives. Pray for me and mine as I do for you and yours, and may love shelter us all our days." Receiving a letter from him was always to receive a benediction that sweetened and lightened not only the day, but the whole week and the month. What wonder- ful endings always to his letters: "Many glorious years to you on this side of the flood and many, many more in the eternal years of God." And his faith grew brighter as his body grew weaker. How cheerly he wrote in those last years of his life! "It is not growing old. I do not call it that. I am living now ten times faster than I ever have and with more appreciation of the rich circumstances of life. But the machine in which I live shows now and then signs of needing repairs. The inhabitant is lively, but his house, oh, the weather attacks it and it's behind the times, but it has done me good service in England and America for sixty-six years." It has been my privilege to see some of his words written during his last period of illness. When it was determined that a surgical operation must be made if his life was to be prolonged, knowing the chances were all against him he wrote in a firm hand full instructions as to what should be done with his property and what gen- eral plans were to be followed in case of his death. Then he added these words: "I am a Methodist with all my might, which ought to mean a simple follower of Jesus. Let no words of praise be spoken over me, or make them few. I have tried to do as well as I could what I have been set to do. I die in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ and complete trust in the goodness of God. No impression made upon me while on this planet compares with that left by Jesus Christ. O such love, and all for me! Let the meta- physics of it be buried as deep as Hades, the joy of it I know and can swear to. I have tried to give my life in common ways in common service." And here is a note written to Mrs. Gill from the hospital a few moments before the operation : "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Of whom shall I be afraid? In this sublime universe of Our Father, think of it ! In this world where Jesus has left the traces of his unselfish sacrifice and love ; in this world where wife and children have given back love for love in suc h a world, fear ? Fear ! ! No more ! Fight and victory and greater victories in this world or others. Pray for me. I am in perfect hope and trust." And I cannot forbear giving the final entries in the diary which he had kept for nearly half a century. They are the true measure of the man. "Sunday, February 4, 1912. Full of brightness; such quiet bliss. I do not understand it. 'Lord, it belongs not to my care Whether I die or live; To live and serve thee is my share, And this thy grace must give. 'Christ leads me through no darker room Than He went through before; He that into God's Kingdom comes Must enter by His door. 'Come, Lord, when grace has made me meet Thy blessed face to see, For if thy work on earth be sweet What will thy glory be?'" "Monday, February 5, 1912. Good sleep. Beauti- ful dreams : Thackeray, Dickens, Longfellow and I at a dinner together. Kittie and I sang, 'When He Cometh,' 'Jesus, the very Thought of Thee/ 'Behold a Stranger at the Door,' 'Let us with a Gladsome Mind.' After din- ner went to sleep. Shall I awake in His likeness?" The life of Benjamin Gill has become a part of The Pennsylvania State College. He came to it just as his powers were at their fruiting point and he gave to it all of his best years. The transplanting from the older soil of Massachusetts seemed peculiarly to fructify and stim- ulate him. He reached his highest powers, as one can see from his sermons, during the vital decade of his life between 1900 and 1910. His stamp upon the college during that decade is indeed a deep one. He has become a tradition and one of the most precious traditions of the college. Happy the institution that has built a soul like his into the foundations of its life. An address delivered at the Memorial Service at State College. III. A TRIBUTE TO BENJAMIN GILL PROFESSOR C. T. WINCHESTER, L. H. D. If I rise to say a few words besides the coffin that holds all that was mortal of Benjamin Gill, it is not to present any eulogy upon him, still less to attempt any cool analysis of his character. I only want to say what hundreds would say were they here "The man that is gone was my friend, and I loved him like a brother." And I am sure that of all the multitude who would say that truthfully, no one has better cause to say it than I have. I have known Benjamin Gill forty-seven years ever since we were boys together here at school, and used to meet in these old class-rooms or ramble together over the dear old Wilbraham hills. Then we were in college together. When we left college our paths diverged a little, but I think there has never been a year in all of the forty-two years since that time when we have not, b> word of mouth or by letter, exchanged some friendly greetings with each other. He was the one and only man of all my college friends from whom I never had any secrets. He knew my heart, and I think I knew his. Our lives ran in different though parallel paths, but he was bound to me by all the fraternal ties that can link two men who must live apart; and in all these years I have had no friend (outside the circle of my own house- hold), so intimate and so dear as he the friend who linked my boyhood to my manhood and my maturer years in ties of work and memory and love. I think Benjamin Gill had a positive genius for friendship, a gift to make and keep friends. He was not a weak or dependent man; on the contrary, he was essentially a manly man. He knew how to stand alone, and firmly, if need be. But there was nothing austere or distant about him. His big heart was full of sympathy. He craved companionship, the cheer of genial inter- course, the stimulus of common interests, and all the sympathies that warm and brighten life. And what a friend he was ! He had so many of the qualities of mind and heart that make life sweet and wholesome. He was one of the most cheerful of men. Life, indeed, for him had never been smooth or easy. I think he had to gain by toil and struggle whatever he at- tained in early life, and all through his life he had to bear 25 almost all forms of trial and disappointment and suffer- ing that can come to any man without his fault. It was no wonder, then, that he had moods of despondency and discouragement. Yet he kept through it all the hope and cheer of youth ; there was a great deal of the boy in him to the last. Of all the hymns he knew and loved and how many he knew I think he loved best Addison's "When all Thy mercies, O my God !" He told me once that in the days of pain and weariness in the hospital a year ago, he used to repeat it, from the first word to the last, at least once a day, and would sing it over silently to himself in the sleepless hours of the night. Of that hymn there is one stanza that always seems to me meant for him: "Ten thousand thousand precious gifts My daily thanks employ; Nor is the least a cheerful heart That tastes those gifts with joy." That was Benjamin Gill. He had a cheerful heart that tasted the gifts of life with joy. He had that excellent gift of humor the power to enjoy all the pleasing contrasts of life. And what a good humor it was ; jovial, yet pure and sweet and kindly always; without a trace of bitterness or vulgarity. He had a laugh that it was good to hear. I shall hear it always. Not the thin laugh of the satirist ; still less the empty and vapid laugh of the mere jester "like the crackling of thorns under a pot" but the big, hearty, wholesome laugh "that doeth good like a medicine." And he had the gift of song if any man ever had. I have said that I shall not forget his laugh; certainly 1 shall never forget his voice. I shall hear it when every- thing else for me is silent the voice I used to hear when we sang together in our college days, sometimes the goodly hymns of the faith, sometimes in lighter mood the careless songs of youth, sung through the college halls or roaming up and down the moonlighted streets of the dear old college town. It has been my fortune to listen for more than forty years to the never-ending chorus in which one generation after another of college boys pour out their joy in song; but I have never heard a voice that, in mingled sweetness and fullness, could compare with his. He sang from his heart the whole of him sang. I can see him now as his face lighted up and his eyes twinkled, and he gave a peculiar lift to his head as he threw himself into his singing. In later years, with heavier burdens and failing strength, he doubtless sang oftenest when he could sing at all those hymns where- with the trusting heart strengthens its faith or soothes its sorrow; but I think he never quite forgot those old songs of carefree youth. The last time he was ever in my house, I remember, we tried to see whether the voice of age could still sound some of those young and careless notes, and grew young together over those olden melo- dies. I cannot help believeing that when his voice learns the new song he cannot quite forget all the old ones; and that wherever he dwells now, he will still have some recollection of those olden and golden days of youth here, "when our mouth was filled with laughter and our lips with singing." We all thought of Professor Gill as the student and the scholar ; and such he assuredly was. There was rare intellectual companionship with him. If culture consists in knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world, then I count few men of my acquaintance more generally cultured than he. He was universally 27 recognized as a most excellent teacher of the classics, especially of Greek. Hundreds of men who studied in his class-room can attest that. I do not say much of his work as a teacher, because I personally never knew him in the class-room; but assuredly he must have been a good teacher, for he was himself filled with the truest spirit of that literature he taught. Greek literature, especially the Greek dramatists and Plato, were a delight to him to the very end of his life. I have never yet known a man who found such inspiration and solace in the best literature, all his days. It was a delight to talk with him about his reading, or to get letters from him. Those letters were always full, not only of keen enjoy- ment of his studies, but of the heartiest appreciation and the most discriminating criticism. The very last letter I had from him a letter every word of which deserves to be written in gold was written in failing strength only about two months ago, on the last Thanksgiving Day. "I am going to try for an old-fashioned letter," he said, "though I suppose my doctor would say no." Then he tells me, among many other things I shall always keep in memory, how even in those days he enjoys his reading. "It is the old books and the choice books now," he said, "for time is short." "The Bible always." (He always read it through once a year.) Then he says: "I am reading a little Plato every evening now; something of the old familiar Sophocles 'who saw life steadily and saw it whole;' and just now," he adds, "I am going all through Wordsworth again, and with what com- fort! Wordsworth, better than any one else, knows how to unite what is temporal with what is spiritual. I thank God I shall not go out of this world without the knowledge of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning." Fewer men ever knew them better than he did, for he knew them by heart. The best the world has to give, in at least three great literatures, he knew in this way. He had taken it into his life. But you are thinking it strange, perhaps, that I am saying so little of the distinctively religious life of this man. Ah! my friends, that was just the secret of the beauty and power of his influence ; he had no distinctively religious life it was all religious. He could say as he so often sang "I know no life divided, O Lord of Life, from Thee!" I think of Benjamin Gill as just as religious in his hours of work, yes, in his hours of play and of genial humor, as in his hours of devotion. There was a rare in- tegrity in his life that wholeness which is really holi- ness. But all those who know him well knew how devout a soul he was, how strong was his faith and how tender his love. Ever since those early days when we knelt in the old church, which stood where this one now stands, and pledged our resolve to lead a religious life (though he began a little earlier than I), ever since those days, his friendship and his example have been an inspiration and a stimulus to all good things for me. Rarely or never have I received a letter from him in which he had not something to say of his religious faith and feeling; and always in language perfectly simple and spontaneous, without the first note of pietism or affectation. It was as natural as the talk of his work or his plans or his friends. He was called to pass through times of trial and dark- ness, but I know how his faith sustained him then. Nor was he by any means ignorant of all the questioning and doubt of our modern time. He said to me once, as he had been reading from Matthew Arnold: "I have Arnold's Dover Beach mood sometimes, oftener than I ought, perhaps ; but my soul feels all the keener thrill with Rugby Chapel." He was, indeed, to hosts of young people, just what Arnold of Rugby was. In the last months of his life he knew pain and weariness and suffering in all their extremest forms, with all the mournful alternations of hope and dis- couragement. But he never murmured and he nevei despaired. "I am fighting a tiresome fight for life," he wrote me in that letter, last Thanksgiving. "I hope to win; but. God is good and gracious, and I am happy in His love and the simple faith of our fathers. God lets me confront the whole universe every day. All the land- scape is opened out before me, and nobody owns it any more than I do ; and He has revealed the infinite in my soul, too. There is a cry for life in me all the time ; but it is a cry for whatsover things are noble, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. That means real life, don't you think so? He who has lavished so much upon me will not leave me comfortless. He will come to me." That was the cry of this man, always a cry for life, but not merely for the life of blood and breath ; rather a cry for whatsoever things are true, noble, lovely, just and of good report, the things that indeed make real life. And no pain or weariness, no disappointment in his expectations, no frustration of his plans, could ever silence that cry, could ever chill his grateful love to the God who had implanted such de- sires in his heart, or could ever extinguish his faith that those desires would somewhere, somehow, be divinely 80 satisfied. He would have liked to live longer, but he was ready to go. There was work all about him he would well have liked to do work that seemed set to his hand, and that he must leave unfinished. But his work was really not unfinished. Of a life like his, so full of work, nobly, lovingly, gently done, so full of burdens patiently borne, and yet so full of joy and cheer and help to thou- sands of hearts, a life that carries with it into the unseen the memory and the love of hosts of others of such a life let us not say that it is unfinished. Say, rather, that it is finished here as God willed, to be continued there as God will "on the earth the broken arc; in the heavens the perfect round." Life will be lonelier to some of us now that he is gone, but for him there is no cause for sighing or regret ; and for those of us who a little longer stay, God grant that we may do our work as faithfully as he did his, and bear our trials should Heaven please to bring them upon us as patiently, nay, even as thank- fully, as he did his ; and, in the meantime, remember as we think on him and on ourselves, that, as he so often sang, "All the servants of our God In earth and heaven are one." Delivered at the funeral services at Wilbrakam, Feb- ruary 14, 1911. .81 PART II. SERMONS AND ADDRESSES SERMONS AND ADDRESSES I. GLIMPSES OF TRAVEL We are at Chester Station though the old city is yonder on the hill. Let us take this horse-car and in five minutes we shall be within the wall. The street we are now travelling was laid by Roman soldiers, or at least dug by them out of the solid rock. Many a time have legions marched down this street at a summons from Rome. King Alfred in his day drew a line from Lon- don to Chester and compelled the Danes to keep to the north of it. This gateway with inscriptions and armor- ial bearings is one of the town gates and the wall which you now see is grey with the memories of nearly two thousand years. This wall is pierced by four gates at the four points of the compass. The old buildings that face these two principal streets are built in a manner peculiar to Chester. The first comes square up to the driveway of the street. The second story is let in to the depth of the rooms on the first ; and the third story comes forward to an even line with the front and rests upon it by pillars, so that the side wall, as you see, is covered and on the second story. The houses, built of stone or brick, are very quaint, the timbers being left visible and often heavily carved and with inscriptions in English or Latin. The city's pleasure walk is the top of the wall, two miles in circuit. Shall we mount it and walk around ? 35 It is a substantial side-walk at least four feet broad of nicely laid stone flagging. There is a parapet on its outer side that was built in the days of Edward I., more than six hundred years ago. Look down the parapet a hundred feet at the waters of the canal flowing slowly by. Here on the wall is a tower where King Charles stood and witnessed the defeat of his soldiers by Cromwell's troops in yonder meadow. And now the wall grows lower and to the right of us stretches away a cricket and tennis ground, scores of acres in extent and level as a floor. Along the bases of yonder bluffs and under the distant bridge must surely run the river Dee, and I fancy that even now I see the royal barge of Edgar and royal subject kings bending at the oar as they row him down the stream; and Isaac Walton fishing yonder on the bank. Our walk now brings us under the beetling wall of the castle that rises a hundred feet above us, guarded by red-coat sentinels. The pavement we are treading now becomes a balustrade along the castle wall and a shelf above the river Dee. But again we turn the corner; the wall becomes a real wall again, the river takes a more respectful distance, and yonder is the old dilapidated mill. Its predecessors, situated on this very spot paid toll to William the Con- queror in the eleventh century. And yonder for sure comes the dusty miller and with him the old and dusty ditty that gives the picture all its charm. "There was a jolly miller once lived on the river Dee; He worked and sang from morn till night no lark so blithe as he, And this the burden of his song forever used to be: I love my mill, she is to me both parent child and wife, I would not change my station for any other life. Then push, push, push the bowl my boys and pass it round to me, For the longer we sit here and drink the merrier we shall be." 36 But while the song dies upon our thought the cir- cuit of the wall is finished and we are walking up St. Werburgh Street to see one of the most venerable cathedrals in Europe the glory of Chester, as the sea walls are of Liverpool. A turn in the street and its glor- ies are full upon us. The cathedral is of red sandstone in the shape of an irregular cross with a tower at the intersection of the two arms that rises one hundred and thirty feet above the roof itself. What graceful pointed Gothic windows light the aisles! Above them still, another row pours down upon the central floor the light which seems to come direct from heaven. As one passes through the church yard and enters the low door, a spell of holy influences settles down upon the spirit. How old, irreg- ular, and broken is the pavement of the nave. Ages since, the inscriptions over the dead, who are buried where we are now treading, had become illegible. But look around you and see the lessons in the lapse of time. There hangs some Bayeux tapestry centuries old, here some banners borne by English troops at Bunker Hill. But the walls speak most loudly of the long generations who have here come and gone to wonder and worship since time was young. The cathedral seems to have grown with the growth of architecture, for it is the Nor- man and Early English. The decorated and perpendicu- lar Gothic styles combine to show builders of widely dif- ferent tastes and separated through long years. Its lofty nave is more impressive than that of West- minster Abbey, and its choir and lady-chapel contain some of the finest wood carving in England. There are stones in the foundation that were laid as early as the appearance of Christianity in Britain or that were the 37 possible foundations of a heathen temple that stood on this spot. Anselm was a bishop here and so was Wolsey, afterwards the great Cardinal, for his coat of arms is still seen carved on the rafters overhead. Walking through the time-worn cloister under the gloomy light, you come to a grim, old disused door in the corner. It is a massive plank, unsmoothed, with im- mense wrought hinges stretching clear across and a latch of the same material. It does not require a very bright imagination to see again the mitred bishops followed by a holy brotherhood of monks pressing across the passage ways and through the door to prayers. And now we have gone our rounds and as we turn our steps reluctantly toward the door the organ begins its saintly strains. The music seems adapted to the fret- ted stone work, the gorgeous windows, the sombre light, and it gradually wanders off up under and around the stately arches and is absorbed in the grey stones. How sadly do we look and look again on all this splendor we may never again see. And lo, as we step out, the steeple bells chime the hour causing us to halt and hold our breath till their last faint echo floats away over the sleepy old town and dies on the ear. These chimes remind me now of standing on the public squares of Bruges on a Sabbath day when the forty-eight bells in that noted bell-tower fairly stopped me and startled me. Why, friends, it was another gospel of good tidings, a faint fragment of melody dropped out of heaven. My ear will have lost its love for the con- cord of sweet sounds when I forget the bells of Durham Cathedral and of Christ Church, Oxford, as I heard them calling the people to prayer. Bells have a music pecu- liarly their own and widely contrasted with other sounds. 38 A fife and drum awaken patriotic valor, an organ settles us into a state of holy devotion, but a chime of bells awakens holy memories of souls and days long since de- parted. "Those evening bells ! Those evening bells ! How many a tale their music tells, Of youth, and home and that sweet time, When last I heard their soothing chime." I am reminded of an entry in Newman's journal : "Sunday evening bells pealing. The pleasure of hearing them. It leads the mind to a longing after something, I know not what. It does not bring past years to remem- brance; it does not bring anything. What does it do? We have a kind of longing after something dear to us, and well-known to us very soothing. Such is my feel- ing at this minute as I hear them." Enough of the old town the cathedral, the organ, the bells the noise of modern life awakens us from our reveries and it fills us with a feeling of disgust. With a conceit that has become the second nature of our country we stigmatize with the name "dark ages" that period in which the cathedral, the organ, the chimes, and other outward symbols of devotion had their birth. Alas that it is our high ambition to be slavishly devoted to work and to that which comes of its wealth and to be willing to live the slavish imitators in wood work and stone work, yes and even in dress, of those whom we look down upon as beneath us in culture and civilization! Our last day of sight-seeing was a visit to two baronial castles, Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall. Both are in Derbyshire in Northern Central England, in the quiet valleys of two adjoining streams, the Derwent and the Wye. Chatsworth, the residence for generations of the Dukes of Devonshire, and the Earls of Cavendish, is an immense building consisting of a series of lordly palaces that have been in building from the days of Charles I. to the present in styles to match the periods. Haddon Hall, a castle and palace of the Fifteenth Century, has not been trodden, save by the foot of the pilgrim, for two hundred years and is become a lordly ruin. It is owned by the Duke of Rutland who is going to allow it to remain as long as it will a specimen of a castle of the middle ages. After a beautiful ride from Rugby through Derby and Leicester, we came in the early afternoon into Der- byshire. This is a sudden transition, for through Wind- sor, Oxford, Stratford, and Warwick the country very generally spreads out before you an open prospect on all sides and usually but little wooded. But now at Amber- gate and Matlock bold hills appear. Abrupt hills, deep gorges with the lazy moving Derwent silent, slow, and black, or tumbling headlong over its rocky bed. We stop at Rowsley Station and take a cab for Chatsworth, our road falling slowly down into a narrow valley then rising up again upon and around a gentle hill slope. Passing on between hedge rows fairly white with dust, we startle from its slumber a little nodding hamlet with the usual inns and church and then, turning suddenly to the left, we cross the Derwent by a stone bridge, to find our- selves in Chatsworth Park. Our road now, for a mile or more, will be a perfect bow along a hill that slopes per- haps thirty degrees until we enter at the other end of the bow by a bridge over the Derwent upon Chatsworth lawns. To this bow the Derwent forms a loose cord and streams so lazily, this warm golden afternoon, as to re- flect the stately mansion and the hills in the rear, these 40 latter lying outside the bow that I just spoke of. We are ascending the slope, at our right the river flowing with reluctance, as it were, through this the loveliest park per- haps in England, trees glassing and dipping their branches in the stream, cows browsing beside or stand- ing reflected in it, grouse in the meadows and deer un- der many of the trees. Passing slowly up to the top- most part of the bow and under the shades of the noble trees, many of which were planted by royal hands, we now see down yonder across the Derwent, set amid lawns and gardens of one hundred and twenty acres in extent, the Palace of the Peak, Chatsworth House. Whence comes these lordly gardens, this park of more than two thousand acres, the whole estate of more than eighty thousand acres? Largely through the sev- eral marriages of Elizabeth of Hardwick, or Bess of Hardwick, who lived three hundred years ago. The combined estates of her several husbands produced this estate, six times as large in extent as the taxable land of the town where I live. You see the somewhat abrupt and wooded hill that passes along back of the house and grounds. Do you descry yonder at its northern extremity more than a mile off, a stone tower? Mary Queen of Scotts was kept a prisoner at Chatsworth several times during thirteen years and was allowed two privileges only, and one was to witness from the tower the sport of hare and hounds on the hill slopes below and around her. Not then, however, did this charming scene lie at the foot of the hills. The wooded heights frowned down upon her; the now clipped and velvety lawns were then unkempt meadows and scraggley fields, desolate phases of nature that made her soul more desolate perhaps, the 41 more so as soldiers paced up and down the visible marks of her assured captivity. It was possibly these scenes that gave birth to Mary's famous Latin Hymn "Oh Domine deus, speravi in te: Oh care mi Jesu, nunc libera me: In dura catena, in misera poena Desidero te. Languendo, gemendo et genuflectendo, Adoro, imploro ut liberes me!" I have scarce time to take you across this stately bridge and within the walls of this ducal mansion, or even to tell you what is there of splendor and beauty ; the frescoed halls and ceilings, the wood carving in the chapel by Gibbons, the inlaid oak floors, state apartments where kings and queens have slept, and above all that restful series of views one gets from the windows. You look out upon lawns, level as a table, sleek as velvet. I am earthly enough to think that I should be satisfied if God gave me no more heaven than that which can be seen from the windows of Chatsworth or of Warwick Castle. What are architecture, painting, antiquities, the galleries of the Louvre, Versailles, Antwerp, Amsterdam with their miles of pictures to the effects that nature can produce, with a little of man's assistance? These peeps from the windows at Warwick Castle at Avon flowing by at the base of the walls, at the ivy-covered bridge spanning it, at the endless green stretch of meadow be- yond with cattle feeding or resting under the broad shade, at the hoary cedars stretching out horizontally their vigorous piney arms and flourishing as when the crusading Warwick transplanted them from Lebanon seven hundred years ago, what does one need of imagi- native productions when the real can be worked up into such celestial effects? But our walk through the almost endless corridors of Chatsworth is done. We are left by our guides at the rear of the house and, neglecting the green-house and the stable, make our way over the parapet into the front yard and for a moment lie down upon the grass under the trees, basking in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, lazy as the historic little stream that is moving by at our feet. Just beyond is Edensor, the little village in the park in whose grave-yard the Earls of Cavendish, Dukes of Devonshire lie buried, among them the new-made grave of Frederick, murdered in Ireland the preceding May. Here is the epitaph: "He went out as Chief Secretary to Ireland, full of love to that country, full of hope for her future, full of capacity to render her service, and was murdered in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, within twelve hours of his arrival, May 6, 1882." But time presses and we must hurry to our carriage. The sun is more than half way toward his setting. Crowds of visitors are scattered everywhere, through the park and on the lawns and by the stream. Reluctantly we wind our way along the bow by which we came, look- ing back again and again at the glories of the stately palace. Meanwhile the cascade on the hill-slope back of the house has been set in motion and a stream of water is now pouring step by step down the hill and causing the whole valley to re-echo. The great fountain also, standing in the middle of the lawn and built originally to adorn a visit of the Emperor of Russia, is sending up its mighty jet two hundred feet into the air, enveloping the mansion in a gorgeous rainbow. With a conscious heart-ache we find ourselves ever and again looking back and saying, "good bye Chats- worth !" as we make our way to another valley only four 43 or five miles distant, watered by the Wye. Here is a scene of contrasts. No glory of an afternoon sun, rather the cool of evening. Gradually night is creeping over this irregular valley of less than a fourth of a mile in width. Gentle hills on either side, wooded and from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet in height. The valley is a rough meadow and considerably inclined. Cows are coming home from pasture. The scene is enlivened by no human being. Babbling Wye is hurrying noisily along as if to escape the haunted old ruin yonder which we shall soon approach by a bridge over the little stream. Yon venerable ruin, ages since covered with moss and lichens, wild flowers and ivy, looks now as though it were part of all that God has made here and around us. It is attractive not to the holiday crowd but only to the oc- casional pilgrim of pencil or brush. You see the ruin lengthwise up the hill; it does not lie in lazy grandeur, like Chats worth, along the greensward at its feet. Lawns, fountains, parterres, gaily dressed crowds where are they all? They would be intruders here. Man departed from these hills hundreds of years ago, therefore let Nature carry on her work. She will creep over the ruins which the hand of man or the tooth of time have made and with ivy and moss will array them in garments fit for old age and burial. Thus it is at Kenilworth where the ivy has grown to conceal the de- fects of what was once so perfect, where the sod is now the tapestry of the elegant dining hall in which Leicester feasted Queen Elizabeth; thus also is it at St. Cloud and of all European ruins that is perhaps the most touch- ing and impressive. There, only fourteen years ago (1870) Napoleon and Eugenie were the observed of all observers the brilliant centre of the gaiety of Paris and 44 Europe. But the Germans came on Paris ; the Commune fired St. Cloud; Napoleon was left without an Empire, an exile. Soon the exiled queen was a widow and but a little later was bereft of her only child. But the revo- lution at St. Cloud does not interrupt the miracle of na- ture. Wild flowers and moss grow already in the win- do wless casements and on the tops of the roofless apart- ments, and pillars of marble and porphyry are assuming that dress in which nature enwraps everything that is doomed to forgetfulness. The walls still stretch away to limited distances under trees that still show the signs of artistic trimming. Flowers grow still in the beds, but only as nature grows them. Gold fish sport in the foun- tains, but alas for the human occupants who planned all this magnificence, they are dead or dead to it. But we are entering the old deserted hall on the Wye. We go up the hill and under the arched entrance. The iron gates are flung open. No warden, looking through the little peephole in the wall, stops to take our measure before admitting us. Many a gay company of mail-clad warriors has gone hence to the hunt or the fight, with hawk and hound and ladies gay; many a one has been brought back under the archway flecked with blood, maimed or dead. With such thoughts do we pass through the gateway and stand in the lower of the two paved courts. The buildings on this side are the rooms where the Lord and Lady lived; on the next side were the servants apartments; there was the chapel; yonder were the dining hall and kitchen. Busy times here two hundred and three hundred and four hundred years ago. See how the stone thres- holds are worn to a curve, how the floors are worn and broken, how the great oak blocks in the kitchen have 45 been hewn down under the butcher's cleaver, and the mixing bowls and kneading boards under the cook's labors. How antiquated the old dais in the hall where my Lord and Lady used to sit, and the minstrel gallery opposite where, as the player touched the harp, poetry flowed from the soul extempore, not always with studied grace yet seldom without poetic fire. Bluff King Hal has walked this floor in merry dance. Arthur, his elder brother and husband of Catherine of Aragon, was edu- cated here in part under the Duke of Vernon. The place is fitted for romance. Dorothy de Ver- non, daughter of the Lord of Haddon, fell in love with John Manners, son of the Duke of Rutland (of course against her parents' will, else why go on with the story?). Young Manners used often to visit the terraces and the woods back of the hall, disguised as a hunter; and in that way young Dorothy kept her affection warm. One night her older sister was to be married to the Earl of Derby and when the festivities were well in progress Dorothy slipped out by a side door and "flew to her lov- er's arms." Next day they were married in Leicester- shire. Of course the old folks were reconciled and, what is more, as the old Baron de Vernon had no heir to succeed him, pretty Dorothy transferred the estates from the house of Vernon to the house of Rutland. But we must cut these reflections short for in half an hour our train will be at Rowsley and the promptness and despatch of business are not in keeping with reveries and poetry. Well, we have seen two magnificent estates. As Americans, we can but admire the power that wealth and prestige have to put the world off at such a respectful distance; to monopolize the broad stretches of hill, val- ley, and streams crowning them with tasteful objects and throwing over them a perpetual Sabbath of quiet or holi- day of mirth. But, let us ask God to forgive us, for in twenty min- utes we shall see a contrast that will make the heart ache. From Ambergate toward Sheffield the express train will, in half an hour, transform this heaven into a hell; green fields into heaps of ashes; skies of unsullied loveliness into an eclipse of dirt and smoke that will be lifted only when the coal-beds and iron mines of the world are consumed. Here fires spring from the earth, not flowers. Here human creatures wear the pinched pale faces of want and toil. Here as many dwellings and people as possible seem to come crowding together by the reversal of all human laws. This is the great coaling region, the centre for steel and iron manufacture, Sheffield and Barnsley. Oh, if there be a place where the gloom, the filth, the squalor, the hard-work, the igno- rance, and the brutality of England centre it must be this Pandemonium through which we are now passing in the lurid dusk of evening. Dickens pictured this re- gion years ago in Old Curiosity Shop, in the wanderings of the Old Man and Little Nell. Mrs. Burnett has given it to us latterly in her novel, That Lass o' Lowries. There is something wrong, depend upon it, in the social conditions and training of a people that can be content to allow such contrasts in such close proximity. ************** If there be any place in this world where thoughts crowd thick and fast, where a man listens for the slight- est reminiscences and thoughts that come from mind and soul, it is in that half mile of street between Tra- falgar Square and Westminster. There never can have been a street on earth along which have passed so many 47 human interests and for so long. For more than a thousand years successively have the national legislature and sanctuary of England been here. Rome has not the eternity of London. A thousand years and Rome was in ruins. A thousand years and London shines with in- creasing lustre, her Parliament holding sway over spaces ten-fold greater than those of imperial Rome and over a complexity of interests that would have crazed a Caesar. An Englishman's best inspirations are received and given back at Westminster. Right there, at present, is the centre of the world, for there are the Houses of Par- liament and the Abbey. As one looks on these two centres of illustrious legislation and burial, (for they are side by side), he naturally asks what there is common to two places so widely contrasted. For repeated visits to the one make him feel that it is inseparable from the other. The busy Parliament crowds on your thought while you are in the Abbey; sitting amid the memorials of Pitt, Fox, Canning, and Peel, your thoughts are car- ried to the legislative halls across the street in which their laurels were won. Or if you look down from the galleries of Parliament upon the grey heads of Gladstone, Bright, Grey, and Argyll, you know that in a few years hence the sacred dust of these men will rest in the Abbey yonder or that, at least, some memorial of them will find place amid other of the noble departed. What are the two poles of contrast that meet to- gether so as to thrill us with the greatness of England and her sons? It is the solid devotion to duty that she demands of the living and the sacred character that at- taches to the noble dead. What enobles every little act of the living, what makes them illustrious when dead? I am sure you will not anticipate my answer. 48 Meeting issues has made England and Englishmen great. Mind I did not say meeting great issues, but issues whether great or small. Neither England nor Englishmen have had always spotless records. She has had her share of weaknesses. Not to go farther back than the present sovereign, there have been things that cause us to blush for her con- scienceless policy, her mercenary hardness. The war that forced opium on China, the action that tried to dic- tate a policy to Afghanistan, that sympathized with and lent money aid to the South during our late war. It was the same conscienceless policy that lost the thirteen col- onies, and thus unwittingly prepared the way for a nation in which might be developed those principles of liberty and religion that could not find room enough in the Old World. Do not forget, however, that England has manfully redressed many of these injuries, or has protested, as a people, against the short-sighted, mercenary acts of her men in power. We need to be reminded by a short table of contents only that, for long generations, grand, soul- enobling influences have issued out of this same palace yard at Westminster. Here what has England not done, even for you and me? In rearing a vigorous yeomanry and soldiery, in re- taining Catholicism while rejecting popery, in rejecting Catholicism when it came to trample with rough shoes on truth and liberty, in translating the Bible, in weakening the power of Spain and Austria, and lending support to the Protestants of Holland and Germany, in awakening the spirit of adventure and discovery, in spreading colonies that have awakened commerce and spread the borders of civilization, in fighting at home and abroad bloody battles 10 for human right these are some of the things England had done before the United States came into being. And let me still keep before you that England's greatness lies in the constant meeting and settlement of such issues. And in accordance with her system these issues are met in the contrasted legislative acts of her two great parties. The issues are decided by the policy of this, for the present, ruling party and mind. This may be a mind influenced by a stern and rigid desire for truth, which anticipates public need and moulds public sentiment, as for instance Mr. Gladstone's ; or it may be the dashing policy of a Disraeli "anything to aggrandize England." But mark you it is the contrasted battle that duty wages with difficulty, that goodness wars with error, with which promptness and fidelity lay hold of and overcome work that waits to be done, that renders men great the world over ; the Dresden Madonna, the Parthenon, the Paradise Lost, the labors of Wesley and Howard, the reforms of 1837 are, each and all, issues of beauty, truth, or goodness of which men shall reap the benefit as long as a vestige of them remain. And it is in the making of these contrasts and issues that all duty lies, out of them all greatness springs. It does not make much difference whether the scene of the issue be in London or Wilbraham, in Rome, or any- where else, in the hall of legislation or the peasant's cot- tage. If it be good, doubt not its memorial is assured. "Honor and Shame from no condition rise. Act well your part, there all the honor lies." There is much of bitterness, of malignment, of misconstruction, attendant upon a life that will devote itself to truth and right, and it is seldom, until after death, that it reaps its due reward of honor and appreciation. Then of a sudden lips that 50 before had cursed break forth in eulogy. Charity then covers defects and buries resentments. Political oppo- sition smirches the character of its opponents nowhere more bitterly and keenly than in England. But the silent spirit of Westminster Abbey seems to rest just a little above the same hoary heads to crown them in a moment with deathless and spotless glory. So Pitt sank to his unsullied rest, dying suddenly there amid the very clamor of the opposing house ; so Disraeli passed suddenly to his rest. No prophet now living can stand within St. Steph- en's gateway, the entrance to the House of Parliament, and cast England's horoscope. What shall be done with Ireland? Will England long maintain her Indian supremacy? Shall Canada become independent? Who shall control the Congo, Suez, and Panama? What changes are to take place in the regency? Will the House of Lords be abolished? Are the titled land own- ers to be robbed of their nobility and land monopoly? These are some of the issues England has to meet. In some of the questions men are yet to find the materials for their greatness. But here also, within this venerable abbey, unworthy men are perpetuated in memorials gaudy and hollow as their own vile nothingness, while others again, worthy in all respects, are left forgotten. Here are no reminders of Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Many of the varied monuments too have not the holy dust near by to correspond to them. Shakespeare's body lies un- der the old church by the flowing Avon in Stratford, Milton is buried at St. Giles in the city, Goldsmith in 51 the Temple, Gray in the seclusion of the country church- yard at Stoke Poges near Windsor. Still, one may feel that it is the privilege of a life- time to stand above the dust of Chaucer, whose tomb seems like another Mecca in the signs of the innumer- able feet that have trodden it; to be above the dust of "rare Ben Jonson" to feel the skepticism of our day rebuked in the noble words inscribed above the poet Spenser: "Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Savior Christ Jesus, the body of Edmund Spenser, the prince of poets in his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works he left behind him." Standing there amid these monuments of mingled excellence you ask yourself, in pain perhaps : And is it then true that after their noblest services, their highest, purest flights of fancy, legislators, reformers, and poets may be left unremembered ? It may seem so. But the man who desires to do noble deeds should learn here that the real monuments of the great dead are not alone upon the walls and floors of this or any such imposing mausoleum. The good and great are buried in appre- ciative hearts, and hence bloom forth, as ages wear away, flowers of undying affection. For today as when Peri- cles uttered it over the Athenian dead, more than two thousand years ago, this sentiment is true, that "the whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men, and not only is their work inscribed on columns in their own land but dwells rather with every one in unwritten mem- orials of the heart." Forget not this then, oh, my soul, as thou leavest these lonely cloisters, as thou walkest, perhaps for the last time, from out the glory of these holy windows, from under the sombre protection of stately groined arches crumbling under the tooth of time. Our visit to the Old World is ended, our ship well out to sea. The quiet loneliness of Scotch and English lakes, the mountain scenery of Switzerland and the even, vine-clad fields of sunny France blend, in our memory, with cathedrals, castles and galleries all together form- ing an impression of a vaguely remembered, heavenly dream. The land has sunk from sight, does not the heart sink also? Holy Head Mount is passed at a great- er distance and partly enveloped in a drizzle of rain and fog, not glorious now as on that afternoon in early sum- mer. The hills of Queenstown do not wear any more that unspeakable loveliness that they present to the eye which for days has only waters, waters and to which land becomes a delicacy absolutely unspeakable. We throw ourselves again upon the mercy of the waters with head toward our home land. A land it is as yet devoid of legend and romance, never destined per- haps to furnish the traveller such tales as linger about the old castles that we are leaving behind us. A land it is with few historic battlefields, but it is a land, thank God, with no incubus upon it of old time customs and class distinctions. Possessing the best results of past European struggles for liberty and religion, explored and settled under the. impulse and influence of religion, its civil and religious institutions grounded on the fear of Almighty God, Truly of such a land may we well be proud ! And at last one night we anchor off that goodly shore, next morning we see to right and left that land which, when we had left it a few weeks before, had glowed with a furnace heat. But how seems it now ? Is this a paradise that we have come upon? The grass is golden under the summer sun, the trees are waving with grace and beauty, it is like the view from Norwich Castle and Chatsworth meadows. Glorious land ! Home! But then comes the larger thought: the old world is gone, the ocean crossed, the ship left, and now the small unremembered place and insignificant round of duty. Forget not this and say it often : "Meet thou thy issues and leave with God and the good thy record." Hands across the sea, your own beloved land there is a larger land yet, broader, ideal, farspread as humanity itself : "Where is the true man's fatherland? Where'er a human spirit strives After a life more true and fair, There is the true man's fatherland." Written in May, 1883, an & rewritten in its present form December, 1884. II. FANNY BURNEY AND HER TIMES The Eighteenth Century, so far as it concerns the literary history of England, is restful and instructive ; its real characters are often quite fictitious, and its fictions very real. It is the period of Samuel Johnson, Squire Western, Robinson Crusoe, Pope, Roger de Coverley, Goldsmith, Dr. Primrose, Addison, and many others. Of all the spots in literary history that precede our own bustling times it is perhaps the most delightful. Ours 54 is a hustling, boastful, thankless, forgetful, conceited period. Let us ramble away from it a little while. Ma- terial forces have been revealed and human forces are being organized in our day. Our times have extended men's horizons too far; have taught us to produce too many things and too rapidly; have taught us to travel too fast and hear too far; have started problems, indus- trial, social, religious, exhilarating all this, no doubt, but necessitating readjustments such as we have not con- ceived and generating evils such as the pessimistic have not presaged. With our period began a ''Novus ordo Saeclorum," that is not the immediate forerunner of the millenium. It is not the things made possible by steam and electricity, but the larger possibilities revealed in man. Several men of our day equal whole regiments. The average man has fallen in value. The individu- ality is gone from him. Let us away then with these times. "With slower pen men used to write Of old when letters were 'polite;' In Anna's or in George's days They could afford to turn a phrase Or trim a straggling theme aright. "They knew not steam; electric light Not yet had dazed their calmer sight; They meted out both blame and praise With slower pen." "Too swiftly now the hours take flight, What's read at noon is dead at night; Scant space have we for Art's delays Whose breathless thought so briefly stays; We may not work ah, would we might! With slower pen." Dobson. 55 In this earlier time there prevailed a more marked individuality in men, an all-roundness which our time is fast levelling and obliterating. There was a distinctive- ness in architecture, a variety and brilliancy in dress, while in our days we have sunk to a uniformity in color and cut. Even poor priests and pedagogues were per- sonalities then. How different from that century of Lili- put is this of Brobdingnag. Men now combine their in- terests. We have trusts in trade, machinery in politics, in- stitutional churches. Then it was the little parish church, the six-by-nine trader's shop, the home, the inn, the club ; it was the time of tea, comfort, domesticity ; of letters, essays, gossips, and, as Thackeray says, "of small-beer chronicles without end." The characters, real or fictitious, are strikingly in- dividual. It may be the good old king, or his still bet- ter queen. It may be Boswell, the prince of biograph- ers, whom fools have called a fool. It may be Squire Western whose appearance makes decent people stop up their ears. In the diaries of Fanny Burney you may peep behind the curtains of the royal household. Exactly at the same hour the good king kisses his daughters good night. With equal regularity the royal night-cap is put on. Their majesties walk at exactly the same hour on Wind- sor terrace and look across that charming bit of country the Thames at their feet, Eton campus on its farther bank, "the distant spires and antique towers" a little further off, and Stoke Poges only three or four miles away. For another bit of individuality, read The Spectator, stealing upon Sir Roger de Coverley at church. Note his shrewd devotion, his homely authority. Or go to his 56 home and enjoy the quaint relationship between him and his chaplain. Sir Roger is a good deal more real than Pope or Swift, or many other men who moved in clothes. Perhaps one of the most individualistic pictures of the Eighteenth Century is at Olney. One edition of Cowper has a charming vignette, not more than one and one half by two inches, a real Eighteenth Century touch, It embraces a full mile sweep of the quiet Ouse, with here and there a little island in the stream. On the left is a country road leading over a gentle knoll which partly concealed the village a mile away. The church, how- ever, can be seen and, back of it, the country stretching indefinitely away. There John Newton preached and Cowper worshipped. Step into the quiet parsonage. There is the sensitive, sometimes partly demented, poet ; the trim-ribboned cap which his cousin, Lady Hesketh, made him, is on his head. Perhaps he is playing with his tame hares; certainly he is smoking his pipe; per- haps he is perusing the small installment of books which came from London in the last coach; likeliest of all, he is at the open fireplace, his house-keeper, Mary Unwin, at his side, and we hear his whisper : Mary! I want a lyre with other strings, Such aid from heaven as some have feign'd they drew, An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new And undebased by praise of meaner things, That, ere through age or woe I shed my wings, I may record thy worth with honour due, In verse as musical as thou art true, And that immortalizes whom it sings. But thou hast little need. There is a book By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light, On which the eyes of God not rarely look, A chronicle of actions just and bright; 57 There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine, And, since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine." These are two or three of the scores of pictures one might draw, so characteristic of that simple, homely time. But, strange to say, this is a period that has been much talked against, owing perhaps to the upheaval across the Channel, owing, in part, also, to the preaching of Whitefield and the Wesleys who called the rottenness of that age sin and its offenders sinners. But the cen- tury that gave birth to The Vicar of Wakeiield, to the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, to When All Thy Mer- cies and The Spacious Firmament, that sent into the world "Penelope Boothly," "Innocence," and "The Neapolitan Fisher Boy," the man who gave that century a wholly bad reputation bears a large burden of responsibility. We come at the Eighteenth Century easily through Irving and Thackeray. The Sketch Book and Brace- bridge Hall are an excellent introduction. "It was while the present century was yet in its teens," as you will recollect, that Amelia Sedley with her dear, confid- ing friend, Rebecca Sharp, left Miss Pinkerton's school, to try the realities of a cold world. It was to Vauxhall gardens that Joseph Sedley took Becky when he got so dreadfully fuddled. It was to Vauxhall that the con- ceited, aimless, puppy (his mother's blue blood) Arthur Pendennis took the confiding little Fanny Bolton and met Costigan, drunk, at the gate. Thackeray's writings from beginning to end, and particularly Esmond and Pendennis, teem with references to the Eighteenth Century. Thackeray, .ki all his sym- pathies, lay the other side of 1801. Taking his liter- ary and artistic gifts at their proper estimate, he is a compound of Johnson, Addison, Swift, Steele, Hogarth, 58 Beich and many others. Thackeray has heart and head and sense and wit enough to take in all the features of that period; so much so that there is not a human trait, nor a local setting of any account which he has not pho- tographed. Let us remember that we are, this evening, roaming at large in that earlier London. We are not aspiring to- ward literary criticism. There are to be no comparisons between the retiring little author of Evelina and her more learned and stately sisters of our later time. There are wide gulfs between little Fanny Burney and colossi like Madame Sand, George Eliot, or Mrs. Hum- phrey Ward. It was the intention of this paper to awaken an in- terest in the period, in the places, in the customs, in the friends and the family, and so, in the personality and the writings, of Fanny Burney. You would throw down the novels Evelina and Cecilia at once as insipid, if you had taken them up without previous preparation. It is the pou sto that we are seeking, or rather the background on which to throw our little figure. The London of the last century was in striking con- trast to that of today. Set the Londoner of King George's day down in St. Paul's Churchyard, or at Tra- falgar Square, and nearly every object and about every activity would be new and strange to him. The streets, for instance, broad, paved, clean, and well-lighted; the immense buildings; the modes of conveyance, particu- larly the hellish locomotives with their roar and speed and immense tonnage ; the heavy drays ; the tram-cars ; the hansoms, bicycles, and autos, these would astound him. He would find many commodities unheard of in his time. He would be impressed with the immense, yet 59 comparatively noiseless, crowds. He would see an or- ganized and much enlarged activity. He would miss the narrow, winding streets, the picturesque house-fronts, the latticed windows, the small-windowpanes, the swing- ing signs, the dripping eaves. "Sir," said Johnson to Boswell, "the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it." When Wordsworth invited Lamb to the Lake Region, Lamb wrote back: "I have passed all my days in London until I have found as intense local attach- ments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Streets, the innumerable trades, traders, and customers; the play-houses, the watchmen, the drunken scenes; life awake if you are awake at all hours of the night; the sun shining on houses and pavements, on print-shops, on old book-stalls, on parsons cheapening books, on coffee- houses, steams of soups from kitchens, these things work themselves into my mind and feed me without the power of satisfying me." The London of that day was quite as busy in its way as now. It was a noisy London and we may get a vivid idea of it from The Spectator, Walter Besant has most vividly described it in his London of Charles II. and George II., and remarks that a modern would be crazed by one day's experience in this earlier London. When the shop boy a hundred and fifty years ago put up the shutters and started off at night for a lark, he had places enough to go. On the outskirts over which the city has long since spread herself were bowl- ing-alleys, and beer-gardens where one might enjoy var- ious entertainment, such as rope-walking, tumbling and pantomime ; plenty of chances to spend your money on 60 tarts and to find your pockets picked perhaps before the evening had passed. Society in those days had much of the affectation and insincerity which are still its prominent characteris- tics. There was considerably more refinement of car- riage and gesture, but address was more outspoken and brusque. This is a subject not to be omitted by one who would enjoy the writings of Miss Burney. The royal household gave the key to the manners of the upper grades of society then as now; and in coarse, vulgar morals, all the Georges, the third excepted, were of so low a standard that one may without profanity echo the sentiment of an English wag who wrote: "When George the Fourth from earth descended, God be praised, the Georges ended." The great characters of the leading novelists of that day are all more or less coarse ; some are vulgar and brutish. Lovelace was wonderfully accomplished, but a seducer. Tom Jones was a conscienceless daredevil. Sophy Western's loveliness is smirched by contact with such a man. Her father, Squire Western, damns for all clean-minded readers what is otherwise as strong a novel as we possess. This coarseness and vulgarity crops out in some of the leading men of the century. After describing a din- ner scene at the residence of one of the nobility, Thack- eray makes a reflection like this : " Fancy the moral con- dition of that society in which a lady of condition joked with the footman, and carved a sirloin, and provided be- sides, a great shoulder of veal, a goose, a hare, a rabbit, chicken, partridges, black-puddings and a ham for a din- ner for eight Christians. Fancy a colonel of the Guards putting his hands into a dish of apricot fritters and help- 61 ing his neighbor, a young lady du monde. Fancy a noble lord calling out to the servants, before the ladies at his table : 'Hang expense ! Bring us a ha' porth o 1 cheese.' What, what could have been the condition of that polite world in which people openly ate goose after plum pud- ding, and took their soup in the middle of the dinner?" From the journal of a fine lady of those days, is the following extract : "Thursday : played with the Duchess of Richmond and lost fifty guineas. Friday : the party lasted till nearly eleven. I won four guineas. Sunday : eight P. M. went to Mrs. Harrises, and lost five and twen- ty guineas at loo." Occasionally is a little addendum : "Read three chapters in Revelations." "Read a little in the Bible and went to bed." This of course was to scare off the old fellow with the horns. Among the prominent characters of the Eighteenth Century are Dr. Charles Burney, author of a History of Music, and his daughter, Frances, author of Evelina. The works left by Miss Burney, particularly her novels, Evelina and Cecilia, together with the Early Diaries, are among the literary treasures of the latter half of the Eighteeenth Century. Here was a young lady who never had the advant- age of an education outside her own home, at boarding school or college, and yet she wrote a novel which at- tracted the interest of the literary world, and caused the greater men of the period to seek her acquaintance and say the most complimentary things. Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Reynolds, and scores of others came to pay their court to a young lady of twenty-five who had writ- ten, she knew not what and had made for herself an enviable place in English Literature. One must briefly sketch the more prominent influences under which such a mind gradually developed, in order to estimate the character and the permanence of its work. I have rambled at large with this in view. Miss Burney was born at Lynn Regis, in Norfolk- shire, in 1752. When she was eight years old, her father moved to London and took up his abode in Poland Street, in the north part of the city. Dr. Burney was a very love- ly man. One can see from the representations of his face that he was a man of unusual talents, genius, warmth, and sensitiveness. He was also a very active man and very optimistic. Through the influence of Dr. Arne and by associa- tion with Handel and many other great musicians, he arose, from the condition of a poor and unknown boy, to be courted at length by the greatest men of all profes- sions and of the highest rank in England ; so much so that far more great people could be seen going into the little house of Dr. Burney on St. Martin Street, Leices- ter Square, than were seen during the same length of time entering the gate of Buckingham Palace or the resi- dence of the nobility on Carlton Terrace. Dr. Burney was employed in giving music lessons from early morning until well into the evening. But when at home, he was the sunshine of the household, a house- hold which was uniformly sunny and happy. Fanny writes in her diary, at twenty-one : "The world is very ill-used in being called a bad one. If peo- ple did but know how to enjoy the blessings they meet, they would learn that our share of misfortunes very often serves but to enhance their value." On the same day, she writes of her father: "The longer I live and the more I see of the world, the more am I astonished and delighted at the goodness, the merit, and the sweetness 63 of that best of men. All that is amiable added to all that is agreeable; everything that is striking added to everything that is pleasing: learning, taste, judgment, wit, humour, candour, temperance, patience, benevo- lence, every virtue under the sun is his." And the hard- headed Samuel Johnson confirms this judgment. He says : "I love Burney. My heart goes out to meet him. Burney is a man for all the world to love. I much question if there is in the world another such man." Burney was, in some senses, the pet man of his century and time in England. It was said of him, that "he gained and kept the greatest number of friends." It had been Dr. Burney's intention at one time to give the world an account of his long and chequered life. We can readily see now what a rich treasure of con- temporary gossip it would have been. The purpose was never carried out, but Fanny Burney, that is Madame D'Arblay, in her old age, spent years in looking over his correspondence and remains, and at that time destroyed vast stores of materials, which our age, greedy for the raw materials of history, would seize on with the most eager avidity. In fact, as it is, what remains of the so- called "Burney Collection" is regarded as among the richest treasures of the British Museum, spoken of much as are the Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian tables. Such a father then was a history in himself. The house was, in a sense, a great university. To be there was to imbibe some of the advantages of a most liberal education. Fanny was fully conscious of this. In her seventeenth year, she breaks out like this : "We have a library which is a everlasting resource when one is at- tacked by the spleen, and in short I have all the reason that mortal had to be contented with my lot, and I am 64 contented with, I am grateful for it. If few people are more happy, few are more sensible of their happiness." She then breaks out into an extended eulogy of her father and into a burst of thanksgiving to God for such a gift. Lord Macaulay, in his famous essay On the Diary and Letters of M. D'Arblay, takes Dr. Burney to task for having neglected Fanny's education. But the diarist does not at all agree with this, and Dr. Burney's entire conduct to his daughter disproves it. If her education was neglected, so was John Stuart Mill's, Edward Gibbon's, Herbert Spencer's. It had been Dr. Burney's intention to send Fanny to Paris, but the sudden death of Mrs. Burney, in Fanny's ninth year, in- definitely delayed and finally rendered it impossible. But just imagine a susceptible girl off at boarding school, while, meanwhile, at her home, drops in of an evening Edmund Burke, the most learned if not most eloquent statesman of any age; or perhaps Dr. Johnson, of more power in English Society than the combined forces of king and parliament; or Garrick to act in pri- vate some distinguished character, before presenting it a few minutes later at Covent Garden or Drury Lane ;or per- haps there dropped in a neat little gentleman, somewhat under the average height, of gentle manner, with large face, larger nose, natural hair falling down his shoulders in graceful curls, who yesterday came to town from Bris- tol where he had preached to an audience of not less than twenty-five thousand people, in some respects the great- est man in the history of the church since Saul of Tar- sus, Mr. John Wesley. Think of being absent from such influences, at a boarding school. 65 And there is education in the neglect that allows a young boy or girl to roam at large in a great library ; to browse at will under judicial direction. The fussy school master does not frighten knowledge out of them, or, what is worse, get it into them the wrong way. Fanny Burney's education was of this character. One May, in her sixteenth year, she makes this record : "I have this moment finished reading a volume called The Vicar of Wakefield. It was wrote by Dr. Gold- smith. His style is rational and sensible. The descrip- tion of the rural simplicity of Dr. Primrose, his simple unaffected contentment, and domestic happiness, gave me much pleasure. It appears to me impossible that any one should read this book through with a dry eye ; at the same time, the best part of it is that which turns grief out of doors." Those words show discrimination. When sixteen years old she writes : "We live here, generally speaking, in a very regular way. We breakfast always at ten and rise as much before as we please, we dine precisely at two drink tea at six and sup exactly at nine. I make a kind of rule never to indulge myself in two most favorite pursuits reading and writing in the morning. No, like a very good girl, I give that up wholly to needle-work, by which means my reading and writing in the P. M. is a pleasure I cannot be blamed for by my mother, as it does not take up the time I ought to spend otherwise." This shows a reader who did not dissipate in books, Here again: "I am reading Plutarch's Lives. His own, wrote by Dryden, has charmed me beyond expres- sion. I exceedingly rejoice that I did not read them be- fore now, as I am every day more able to enjoy them." 66 She speaks of her joy at reading translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and later of the pleasure with which she took up Italian. Then she says : "I rise at five, six, or seven my latest hour. I have just finished Middle- ton's Cicero, which I read immediately after Hooke's Roman History. It is a delightful book. The style is manly and elegant ; and, though he may be too partial to Cicero, the fine writings he occasionally translates of that great man, authorize and excuse his partiality." This is sound criticism of a book which is still a classic. She reads the Henriade of Voltaire, a little later, and gives it a scathing criticism. From these few citations you perceive a young mind getting for itself the elements of a liberal education, fill- ing in the bud so soon to burst in delicate blossom. She reads the languages, reads with discrimination and di- gests what she reads. Her father's loveliness, his manner- liness two things quite unusual in those brusque times together with his love of learning, had attracted all this talent to their little home, and made it a sort of univer- sity. Dr. Burney's industry was constant and he in- stilled industry into his children. Seven A. M. saw him at his music lessons; his meals were often taken in the coach as he rode between pupils. Often he was not at home before nine at night. And all the time he was preparing his History of Music, little Fanny acting as his secretary. And all this time she was stealing odd moments to perfect her novel. Fanny's father then and the blessings that came with him, together with her extreme devotion to him, formed the chief element in her education. Her own mother died when Fanny was nine years old. She had been an excellent mother. She was replaced by another, six 67 years afterwards, a very dear friend of the first Mrs. Burney, and greatly beloved by all the children. The new mother did not believe in young girls writing, an:' was the cause of Fanny's burning, in her fifteenth year, all she had ever written, among other things The Story of Caroline Evelyn. We have seen that Fanny had a well-stored mind. She was naturally alert and had grown more keen and intense. She had a mind which took snap-shots, and such a mind should make a writer. In her twenty-first year, she visits Exter. She attends the afternoon ser- vices in its cathedral. But the singing is so comical that it spoils for her all the service. There is no organ. The time is set by a weaver. The people are trying to sing in parts, but cannot. The description is very entertain- ing. To enjoy the description, one must remember that it was the time when there were as yet hardly any hymns and when the people, for the most part, sang in unison. There were no instruments except an occasional violin- cello or bassoon, or possibly a barrel-organ. The latter could play a dozen tunes and grind out "Old Hundred," "Devizes," or "St. Martins." Comical indeed must the effect have been as the lagging people sought to keep pace with the organ when once wound up and started. Now a camera as sensitive as her mind will be daily tak- ing innumerable impressions which are the best materials for novels. Another of the persons contributing to make Fanny's novels a success was Mr. Samuel Crisp. She had been gathering materials for writing: he gave her hints which moulded her form and style. Evelina, like Pamela, Humphrey Clinker, Red-Gauntlet, etc., is writ- ten as a series of letters. And as we are aware that the writing of an interesting letter, to say nothing of a long series of them, requires a peculiar type of mind; and as Miss Burney has, among the number of her let- ters, some that are first rank ; we may well glance for a moment at the influences which perfected her in this lit- erary type. Samuel Crisp was a man of fine appearance, of lib- eral education and fortune. His tastes combined liter- ature, music, and the arts. He aspired to write a drama, against the advice of Garrick and other friends. The play was not well received, and Crisp retired to live at Chesington Hall, not far from London, and came to town only in the theatre and opera season. It should also be said that, after some years of residence in Rome and other Italian cities, Crisp had come back to England to live on his estates at Hampton, where in consequence of too liberal entertainment of too many friends he had run through most of his fortune. His retirement was not solely due to despondency at the reception of his drama, but that, together with his weakened fortunes and health, led to his retirement. Crisp's intimacy with the Burneys began in Fanny's ninth year, he being then fifty- five. The relation between them was almost as close as father and child. The Burneys are always going to Chesington and Fanny always calls him "Daddy." Crisp's life had failed, so far as the drama of Vir- ginia was concerned, but when he, of set purpose, un- dertook to mould the life of "little Burney," as Johnson called her, he rendered the literary world a unique ser- vice. A quotation or two will show you that he had an intention. Here is a short extract from the first letter he ever wrote Fanny, in her twenty-first year: "Dear Fanny, though the weak knotty joints of my knuckles are somewhat tired with writing to your mamma, yet I cannot forbear acknowledgement of your kind and enter- taining letter. You are an exceedingly good child. You have good and grateful sentiments about you. In short you have good things in you and I wish it was in my power to bring about but stop, my pen, you are go- ing beyond your line; but there are very many valuable people in this wide world of ours, that for want of rightly understanding one another, do not do what na- ture seems to have intended they should do, I mean, draw close to one another in mutual attraction." In an- other, soon after, he writes : "If once you set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical, and run in smooth periods, I shall mind them no otherwise than as newspapers of intelligence. There is no fault in an epistolary correspondence like stiffness and study. Dash away whatever comes upper- most ; the sudden sallies of imagination, clapped down on paper, just as they arise, are worth folios, and have all the warmth and merit of that sort of nonsense which is eloquent in love." Remember these are the words of an old man, nearly threescore and ten, to a young girl of twenty-one. It is not possible here to review a corres- pondence which, on both sides, was rich and helpful, and contributed to render Evelina a permanent success. It would be a distinct oversight not to mention, in this connection, a correspondence which took place at intervals, during this same period, between Fanny and a Mr. James Hutton. Hutton must have been nearly as well on in years as Crisp. He was a Moravian, and lived in Chelsea on a property leased by Count Zinzendorf. He was a sort of head among the Moravians, pietistic, but with a remarkable degree of horse-sense. He made 70 himself a great friend with the Burneys. I copy the fol- lowing from one of his letters to Fanny. "You will per- haps recollect that the first page at least of this is in answer to several parts of your letter, which I have be- fore me ; though it was so impressed upon my mind as that I could answer it without looking at it again. Whenever you write from the heart, be assured that every correspondent of taste will have reason to be satisfied and pleased; and never let letter-writing cause you any study. Nothing ever disgusted me so much as many la- bored, printed letters I have seen, which were rather per- formances than letters, and therefore, painful, stiff, far- fetched, unnatural stuff. Such are all Bussy-Rabutin's almost. Madame de Sevigne's are infinitely more to the taste of the discerning, while Rabutin's vex and tease my heart and disappoint it, and are nauseous to my very soul, considered as letters. Affectation spoils everything in writing, singing, speaking, books, gesture, gait, in short, in everything. I have found much pleasure in Madame de Maintenon's letters. They are most cordial, free, easy, and unaffected. But why should I not leave off?" But, to speak no farther of the influences that fed the mind or moulded the expressions of this young girl, there came a day, it was the latter part of January, 1778, when a novel appeared in London with the title Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World. It appeared in a manner so silent, shy, and secret; the news of its excellence filtered into the community so gradually, then so rapidly; the demand for it at the book-stalls became so great, that, considering the kind and number of people who were affected by it, together with the permanent influence it had on the heart, and the 71 good it accomplished in the field of English fiction, noth- ing exactly like the manner of its appearance has ever been known in the history of literature. This young genius, who had been advised by her stepmother not to write, had burned the History of Caroline Evelyn, but it was a Banquo's ghost. In the latter part of 1770 Dr. Burney was making a tour of France and Italy for his health. It was during those months that Fanny had tackled again the old story under the new name Evelina. When Dr. Burney re- turned she had to devote all her time to him and did nothing on the novel. But in a year or so he was again absent in Germany, during which time the family moved into St. Martin's Street and Fanny began writing again. Soon the father returned and was busy in getting out his History of Music. As Fanny saw her own fair hand- writing come back, so to speak, from the printers in real type, she thirsted to see her own story come in the same fashion. So she took the story which had been rather roughly finished, wrote it out in a neat hand and offered it to Dodsley, who had published Rasselas, The Diction- ary, Gray's Elegy, etc., in Pall Mall place. He would not look at the anonymous manuscript. It was finally offered to Mr. Loundes, of Fleet Street, for twenty pounds. Here is the playful manner in which she begins her diary for 1778: "This year was ushered in by a grand and most important event for at the latter end of Jan- uary, the literary world was favored with the first pub- lication of the ingenious, learned, and most profound, Fanny Burney! I doubt not but that this memorable affair will, in future times, mark the period whence chronologers will date the zenith of the polite arts in this island, etc." Her two aunts are first apprized of her secret, then her cousin, Edward. Her sisters were in the secret. One morning at breakfast, Mrs. Burney, in pres- ence of the girls, read the announcement of the publica- tion of a novel called Evelina, going right on, in blissful ignorance, to other topics. We shall say nothing of Cecilia. Five years after the appearance of Evelina old "Daddy Crisp" died. Streatham was not a centre of attraction as it had been. Johnson had a paralytic stroke and died soon after it. Fanny's world was much darker, so many lights had gone out of it. A little later she was chosen to the office of maid-in-waiting on Queen Charlotte, and when she came forth from that confinement it was into quite an- other world, with tastes changed and health prostrated. It was with difficulty she escaped the royal prison. In 1793 she was married to M. D'Arblay, a French officer, who with Madame de Stael and others was living as a refugee in England. The two lived happily together for years, partly in England and partly in France. Fanny, or Madame D'Arblay, enjoyed her father's presence for many years, since he did not die until she herself was sixty-two years old. Fanny Burney lived in the Eighteenth Century, Madame D'Arblay in the Nineteenth Century. Fanny Burney was knowing to the society and customs of that earlier time, she lived to see the utterly changed customs of our own time. In Fanny Burney's day, the sedan- chair, with now and then a cab or coach, was the only mode of conveyance. Madame D'Arblay lived to see the locomotive and to ride to and from the South Coast in carriages drawn by steam. 73 If her writings lack interest and pray, what novels do not ? it is because she was of too alert a nature ; she dwelt too much upon, she adhered too closely to the man- ners and people of her own time. She who had received twenty pounds for Evelina received three thousand for Camilla, but the merits of each novel were almost in in- verse ratio to the sums received. One is safe in closing such a ramble with the senti- ments of one whose criticisms are still accepted as sound, and, in doing so, it is the wish of the writer to recommend to you the essay of Macaulay which is among his best. "Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a tale might be writ- ten in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humor, and which yet should not contain a line inconsistent with rigid morality or virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in the fair and noble province of letters. Several accomplished women have followed in her track. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honor- ably distinguished by fine observation, by grace, by deli- cate wit, by pure moral feeling. Several among the suc- cessors of Madame D'Arblay have equalled her; two, we think, have surpassed her. But the fact that she has been surpassed gives her an additional claim to our re- spect and gratitude ; for in truth we owe to her not only Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, but also Mansfield Park and The Absentee" 74 So far Macaulay, and at the close, his remarks seem almost comical, for we may add Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Robert Elsmere, The Helmet of Navarre. What a host of the best novelists now are wo- men. Women's achievements in fiction during the last forty years and they are no doubt in good measure due to the impetus given by Evelina are the later marvel of English Literature. By her achievements here she has come very near to displacing her accomplished and privi- leged brothers and has formed the front ranks. Had her opportunities been equal to those of man during all these centuries, would not the greatest dra- matists and historians have been women ? As it is, there are noble traces of woman everywhere in our literature. No novel is readable that has not had a woman in it. Long have we known that. Lyric poetry sighs its soul away sometimes in sheer nonsense over a lovely wo- man. John Ruskin wrote long ago in regard to Shakes- peare's men, that there is always a flaw even in the best of them. The plays are built really on the women. You have as he says, and perhaps it is true no hero. Othello would have been had his simplicity not made him a prey to baseness. Hamlet would be but for his in- dolence and speculative dreaming; Romeo is an impa- tient boy ; Antonio is languidly submissive to adverse for- tune ; whereas there is hardly a play which has not a per- fect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and in errorless purpose. Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Imogen, Per- dita, Viola, Rosalind these are, in a sense, faultless. So exalted, then, are the places held by woman among the creations of English fiction. Nay more, Providence seems to be quite on the side of the ladies, for the three flourishing periods of our lit- 75 erary history are named after Elizabeth, Anne, and Vic- toria. Delivered before the Woman's Club of State College, February 2, 1897. III. A BROTHERHOOD OF CULTURE In the latter part of the last century, there was estab- lished at William and Mary College, a society called Phi Beta Kappa, chapters of which were established at Yale in 1780 and at Harvard in 1781. It now numbers more than a score of chapters. The society was founded "in order to unite the wise and the virtuous of every degree and of every country." It has been mainly honorary, meeting but once a year to listen to a learned address from some person of eminence, to transact any necessary business, and to elect undergraduate and honorary mem- bers. Its standing rule has been to make eligible for membership that fourth or third of the graduating class which ranked highest in scholarship and was of good moral character. It has, furthermore, been customary to elect to membership a limited number of men, usually graduates of college only, who were not eligible to mem- bership at graduation, but who have in the intervening years done something to add to their reputation or effi- ciency in some substantial way. If a man has grown to be a commanding preacher, or has made a sound lawyer, or a good councilman, or a sagacious educator, he has gradually won the recognition of Phi Beta Kappa. In this way this society has had a widespread influence for good, and has been entirely free from snobbishness and pedantry. 76 Among the Universities and Colleges of our type, there has sprung up a strong desire for a society of like, or nearly like, character, to which should be eligible all persons who rank within the first fourth or third of their class at graduation. The unique character of such a society and its pecu- liar advantage for men who need stimulus is only too obvious, but it is not unfitting that we dwell for a mo- ment on these thoughts, particularly as we have just in- stituted a chapter and are inducting our first class into membership. The stimulants to education are both positive and negative. It is the birch rod that first makes the boy smart. The teacher gets even with him by keeping him after school, and as he gets older the faculty takes repri- sals in the shape of reprimands, demerits, suspensions, or dismissals. There is also a positive side. The Ro- man school master began with crusts of gingerbread in order to coax boys to learn the elements. The ginger- bread for the older sort comes in the shape of grades, prizes, honors, diplomas, scholarships, and membership in societies, learned or otherwise. These are all stimu- lants of like intent ; they aim to keep a man toned up to work and true to standards. But some of these positive and, so far as we can see, indispensible incitements stand squarely in the way of manly work. Why can't we have an intelligent, disinter- ested man, an outsider, to umpire a daily recitation? The room where instruction is given should be absorbed in work and not distracted by a record of it. As it is, there are on the part of the instructor occasional in- advertences, unexplainable attractions and repulsions which mysteriously exist between natures, and these 77 make him use the marking system unfairly and unevenly. I think unquestionably the young ladies outrank the gen- tlemen sometimes, from the fact that we incline more naturally to them than we do to the masculine persuasion. Anyhow it is picayune to be putting on your glasses to score the rank of a senior who, in a few days, is to be re- lieved, thank Heaven, from the long years of "scor- ing," of one sort and another, which he has endured. He ought to have known long since the value of work per se. He ought already to be absorbed in loyal, strenuous work. But as it is, his lofty ambition is "to skin through," as he calls it, and this because of that Eozoic survival, the marking system. The prize is even more objectionable. If it is awarded for a brief competition, crookedness may easily secure it. At Yale, in the old days, the oratorical prize con- testants hired carriages and filled them with their friends. These were driven to the hall of contest for the purpose of making applause, and more than one contestant has carried off the prize that way. But even where a prize is given for all round excellence and after years of com- petition, under circumstances where possibility of crook- edness is wholly eliminated, motives will be impugned and the man will hear that original and never before heard of accusation that he had "a pull with the faculty." Some of us older ones still recall the crucifixion caused by commencement parts valedictory and saluta- tory, philosophical, classical, scientific, and other orations galore. With pleasing sarcasm, may we inquire for them now in the spirit of the old song: "Where are the Marys and Anns and Elizas Loving and lovely of yore? Look in the columns of the old advertisers Married and dead by the score. Gone like the tenants that quit without warning, Down the back entry of time." These things reduced teachers to pedagogues and kept boys from becoming men. Conceit of scholarship, either in the professor's chair or the student's bench, we are hopefully outgrowing. Education is intended to create men who shall secure power to work, in some sort, and who shall love work. Associations which bring together men of culture, of social power, of moral tone, have long since furnished incitements in harmony with man's larger growth and suited to all his later years. The older societies of this sort, like Alpha Delta Phi and Psi Upsilon, have in most colleges elected men on their entrance to college. It was genuine inspiration for a young chap entering Col- lege to be told that he had been honored with an election to one of these societies. Where such a society had a palatial hall, and where its men were of high standard, to secure such an election was the privilege of a life- time. Election to the Senior Societies at Yale, where society influences are unusually strong, has always been considered the proudest privilege of a college career. And when the tottering, gray-haired old members of these societies return to Yale at Commencement time, you will find them invariably at the chapter house of the "Skull and Bones" or the "Scroll and Key." Such cir- cles were small, but the spirits were choice and the bonds very close. But of all societies for the encouragement of sound learning, none has had so extended or so salutary an in- fluence as Phi Beta Kappa. It has studiously sought, in all its chapters, men of the best type. Real worth has 79 secured a man membership "whatever may have been his race or previous condition of servitude," "qualicunque patre natus," "whoever may have been his dad," as Horace says. Many a man has waked up happy, after four years' hard plodding, to find within a week of grad- uation that he has made Phi Beta Kappa. She has offered no prizes, she has granted no parchments, she has held, in most chapters, only one annual meeting, and yet the influence she has wielded has been subtle, cath- olic, and permeating the strongest fibre, by all means, in American Scholarship. To secure its badge, to learn the meaning of its symbols, was to secure a nominal, and sometimes a real, touch with some of the master spirits of the age. In her yearly meetings, and through the mouths of her learned orators she has contributed to the resources of American Literature, as many examples might show, among them Emerson's address on "The American Scholar." But Phi Beta Kappa has narrowed its original in- tent. They say that anywhere within the Queen's do- mains, just as sure as a "Liberal" gets rich he invariably turns "Conservative." Phi Beta Kappa now unites the wise and the virtuous only as they are college-bred and classically educated. Hence the need, in institutions like ours, of a society whose tone shall be equally high, but whose spirit shall be more catholic, a society not satisfied to welcome the man with theological, or phi- losophical, or literary culture alone; but a society which shall tear down all the fences, for it is these that obstruct all prospects ; which shall secure the "Unity and Democ- racy of Education." That phrase, which is part of the preamble of our new society, might well be made the subject of a learned 80 dissertation at some later meeting of this society. If the phrase was chosen of set purpose, after a broad survey of the whole field of educational history, then certainly it would be difficult to improve upon it. That aim has been awaited at least five and twenty centuries. For education, as yet, has been neither "united" nor "demo- cratic." The antagonisms among schoolmasters and schools of education have been greater than among sects and theologians. And the antagonisms are as outspoken today as ever, though the issues are different. Educa- tional theory in our own country has met with an entire upheaval since 1870 and the end will not appear for many years. Glance backward over twenty- four centuries. It is hardly probable that for many centuries to come fairer phases of civilization will bless this world than those benign influences consequent upon the rise of Grecian Literature, which spread over the shores of the Archi- pelago, over Sicily, and lower Italy, and the south of France; which caused to be reared on many a wooded slope temples, the very perfection of symmetry and taste, which made every acropolis and market-place a museum of art. One weeps to think how this fair progress was stayed by Spartan meanness and duplicity. It irks one to think how the Roman mind but half interpreted the Greek spirit, and one trembles to think that the whole fair vision was all but obliterated ; that Homer and Horace and Virgil were barely saved from destruction in a chaos al- most equalling that which preceded Creation, the pal- impsest alone remaining, in some cases, to show to us the almost illegible traces of what learned ignorance had failed, thank God, wholly to obliterate. 81 When a man sees, in the first Christian centuries, the great giants pitted against each other Justin and Tertullian against Plutarch and Aurelius and Lucian he knows the darkness is gathering over learning. He knows the light of heathen genius must be extinguished in the presence of such holy men as Basil and Chrysos- tom, St. Augustine, and Jerome. With the increase of monasticism he sees the setting of all rational knowledge and he feels the gathering of the fogs of subtlety and sophistry that are to overhang the night of Europe. The light of epic and lyric poetry gone out, the cathedrals and monasteries were the sole guardians of a knowledge gloomy as themselves. The school men of the West and the Greek disputants of the East thought they had the whole of knowledge. And indeed they had, in a deadly grip, too, had it not been for other forces coming to the rescue Bernard and Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, or better still, Dante and Petrarch, Wiclif and Caxton, the Stephenses, Luther, and Erasmus. One scans his way down through all this dark history with trembling, wondering how, in the turmoil and disagree- ment, anything was saved, wondering that education had not effectually put the knife to its own throat. "Unity and Democracy of Education" indeed! Well may one exclaim who tries to compass the real situation. And if the day of unity and democracy in education had even now come we might take heart of grace. Do we then live in days of greater educational charity ? We tell of a greater enlightenment and speak of a broader in- telligence and yet we relegate all the past to oblivion with a flippancy which is amazing. The sound of wheels is in our ears. The hiss, the hum, the buzz, wholly occupy us. We ungraciously think there never has been any- thing before us and that there will be hereafter only we and our like. But if we looked at the whole process of man's education past and future as well as present we should see, that in all these sweeping changes to which education has been doomed, will doubtless still be doomed, there is a unity and there is a gradually ap- proaching universality; seeing this we should look upon the past with more reverence and upon the future with more humility. Doubtless on the Nile and the Euphra- tes, on the Indus and the Yangtse whole civilizations have been entirely obliterated, which have contributed as much to our day as we shall contribute to that far future. If we look wisely and faithfully and far enough into the future will not a wise charity cause us to read there the ruins of our own age the refuse heap of scrap-iron, our "pyramids," our "acropolis?" In these words we have been pleading briefly for a larger charity and a deeper love toward all education of all phases. It has all helped to rear the structure on which we are built and must build. We hail this new society, then, because it will welcome the intelligent engi- neer, or agriculturist, or architect, or chemist, or physi- cist as heartily to membership as it will the man of let- ters ; or, if you prefer it so, will welcome him as them. It is the product of noble thought that we seek to en- courage and reward, recognizing among these products Iliads, and Pullman cars, dramas and triple expansion engines, land fertilizers, or sewage systems or steel con- structions. It is our duty to hold up educational theory and to give it material and tangible illustration, and to be in the vanguard with our enthusiasm and our charity, seeking to broaden the domains of man. It is all truth 83 we must seek, and of such the Holiest has declared, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." "It is the duty of the Colleges," says Dr. Stryker, "to make iron into steel and of the Universities to make steel into tools. Specialization which is not based on culture attempts to put an edge on pot iron." And there is a truth there applicable to every growing man, no matter how gray his hairs or what the number of his years. The intelligent mind is always suffering a pud- dling process. It is never too late to burn out impurities from any of us, never too late to add to our stock, quali- ties which make us, in some sort, more valuable and more serviceable. By keeping this truth in view we shall best broaden the foundation of our College; we shall better the char- acter of our work ; we shall produce men and women of purer and keener intellectual fibre, who will do us credit ; we shall keep a solid hold on our graduates ; we shall add to the reputation of an institution which has been founded by the beneficence of the general government; we shall give to it such a character as will leave it no longer a pensioner of the state, but a stalwart child, or man rather, on whom the state will be eager to bestow its beneficence. Address at the first Initiation Service of Phi Kappa Phi, June 12, 1900. 84 IV. VALUES INHERENT TO FRIENDSHIP Friendships play so prominent a part in our lives that they should more frequently be the subject of our careful consideration. By friendships are not meant mere passing kindness, good manners, which it is daily in our power to render to some one ; nor does the term include certain temporary relationships which, while they call for something more than passing kindness, do not and need not develop into the permanence of friendships. In our professions and callings in life, we are thrown into re- lations with others, more or less permanent, and though such relations are known and felt to be kindly and even friendly, yet they do not develop into the stature of friendships. Two men might be on the teaching force of this College for ten years and be kind and friendly in all their relations, but if circumstances should call either of them away, there might never thereafter be any cor- respondence or contact of any sort between them, and that would prove they had been something less than friends. Nor are our friendships a mere sentiment, a thing with fictitious foundation, bred perhaps by the reading of romance, intended to correspond in theory to something we have heard or read of. Our friendships are, if they are anything, real, and they deal with realities. Our blood relationships are not to be included, for over them we have no choice and they do not furnish such op- portunity for development of our higher natures as are furnished by what we dignify with the title friendships. Real friendships are those mutual likings that spring up between persons, whether of similar or dissimilar tastes, likings that move each to seek the society of the other. Picture a scene on the Swiss lakes, the deck of 85 a steamer crossing the lake. On one side a group of four, on the other a group of five. In the latter group, a young Harvard student, nervous and restless, evidently attracted by the young man in the other group. He finally steps across and makes acquaintance with John Ruskin, the great art critic. Ruskin says of the meet- ing: "Here I found my second friend, my first real tutor, Charles Eliot Norton." The cause for such a sudden and electric thrill of friendship is a beautiful secret, as yet undiscovered. That two athletic young men, like David and Jonathan, meeting perhaps for the first time, should strike a friend- ship never to be weakened or broken; friendship that caused the magnanimous Jonathan there and then to re- sign all his rights to a crown, is indeed a mystery. Had either been other than what he was, such conduct would have bordered close upon sentimentality. But each be- ing what he was, we have in them the finest example of human friendship, for each had the proportions of a king. I would not have you think that my definition of friendship is pitched on too high a key, or is too select. When I recount such illustrious cases as Damon and Pythias, Achilles and Patroclus, Jesus and John, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, Boswell and Samuel Johnson, you say, from your inmost hearts : "Yes, that is freindship ; such is the way men should live ; joying in each other's successes, in each other's gifts, HI each other's humanity, glad to sacrifice where sacrifice is possible, open to criticism, eager for all that is most excellent." And there are millions of friendships, un- seen and unconspicuous which daily reach these stand- ards. For the fact that men of wealth and talent are brought into such noble relationshio with each other, a 86 relationship which the world cannot fail to see, because they are what they are, need not blind our eyes to the fact that, daily, among the poor and the unknown also are examples of the purest friendship, equally well- pleasing in the sight of God and equally available for all the noblest purposes of manhood and womanhood. Look at any great life and in what does its richness and splendor consist? In its friendships. The life of a hermit cannot be as interesting as the life of some man who has been much among men. And a man may be much among men and yet may lack the capacity for friendship. I think this moment of two men. One touched mil- lions, with the intent to do them good. But his sympa- thies spread over too large a space. His ideals took al- most everything out of our poor humanity, and though he was a preacher, and a very great preacher, yet he had very few friends. The latter did not touch one man where the former touched ten thousand. But the latter, although he touched a comparative few only, touched them as personal friends, touched them with a purpose, touched them on all sides of their nature, and not merely on one side. One of these men studiously sought few or no associations outside of his own profession, the min- istry. The other was intimate with the members of the nobility, with church dignitaries, with statesmen, law- yers, physicians, professors, dramatists, artists and musi- cians. Hence every page of the Life of Samuel Johnson throws a white light on true friendship; friendships that were frank enough to speak out their differences ; friend- ships that could quarrel occasionally and yet make up again ; friendships that did not taboo a man because of some human failings. 87 The student in college is furnished with opportuni- ties for friendship such as are offered nowhere else in life. Rivalry enough there certainly is in the world out- side; envy enough, defamation enough among all trades and professions, but with a few insignificant exceptions, your life here is free from all such rivalries and there are broad and ample occasions to let the heart seek such associations as it will. During a four years' course, you are thrown in contact with seven classes, with hundreds of other young persons your equals in age, with the lives of all of these a little, with the lives of a score of them still more, and with a chosen few still more and more completely are you brought into the most intimate touch. What is it that men recall who return to us here after the lapse of months? Certainly it is not their studies. I have seldom known the most scholarly men to revert to those things. They have forgotten their studies as fully as they have forgotten the dinners they then ate or the shoes they wore. But when they give you the warm grasp of the hand and look at you with an eye that kindles and burns, you know there is one thing they have not forgotten their friendship. And that is one way in which, in the long run, we men get our pay for service rendered. An undergradu- ate is not always as loyal as he might be. He thinks that you are trying to crowd him. He is always, or al- most always, "against the faculty ;" but it is not so when he returns as an alumnus. Time has invariably burned out the dross of other thoughts and now the thought stands strong and conspicuous in his mind that, after all, you were his friends. And the charm of all the colleges located in the country and not in the city lies in the close friendships 88 which they make possible. We can each of us easily re- count the many advantages that come from a city loca- tion. Those advantages are usually stated at more than they are really worth. In the city furthermore are the undeniable disadvantages, of crowding, hurry, and dis- trust. There is something, too, in the very atmosphere of a public school or college provided it be not too large which brings out the elements of friendship in men. Home does not develop them. Mother, father, sister, brother, none of them is able to thaw out certain secrets, certain shynesses, certain weaknesses. But a man is not in college a week or a month before the avenues of his heart have become open thoroughfares to somebody. He has unbosomed himself in some things to one friend, in others to another, and by doing so has taken in a feature of his education which no department of the col- lege could supply, which perhaps is of more value than what he will get out of all its departments combined. True friendships arise out of a mutual conviction of excellence or worth of some sort. What caused the thrill of friendship between these two Hebrews? Here was Jonathan, not far from thirty, fully six feet in height and large in proportion a fine presence as he stood there encased in royal armor. He was as valiant with the bow as his father with the sword. Many a time already had his armor been crimsoned with human blood while fight- ing the Philistines, the enemies of God. He was strong, valiant, daring, filial, devout. David knew all this of Jonathan. On the other hand there was David, not much over twenty, standing there with a sling in one hand and the dripping head of Goliath in the other. Dressed as a shepherd, not a soldier, he had come on a brief visit to camp to see his brothers who were fighting in King Saul's army. In stature he was by no means so com- manding as Jonathan, but he was equally fearless, equally daring, equally devout. Here then was the primary and main reason for this sudden friendship. Jonathan may have thought: "Here is a young fellow, every inch a soldier, worthy to be honored infinitely more than I who am a king's son. He has done a deed I dared not have done killed this champion, the dread of our armies/' It is with some such feelings that Jonathan began to love David as his own soul. It was under such convictions that " Jona- than stripped himself of his robe that was upon him, and gave it to David and his garments, even to his sword, his bow, and his girdle." And every friendship of life, that is worth calling such, starts in that way. You are not drawn to a man who is a nobody, who has not in him some promise, some worth, some talent, which elicits your admiration, and makes you aspire to his acquaintance. Understand me, I do not mean gifts or excellences which you think are going to profit you. Such things do not enter into the thoughts of real friends. If what has been said is true then bad men, men with low and mean ambitions, cannot be friends. Men who lead each other into sin and crime are acting on principles which are too shaky to bear the noble super- structure of friendship. The friendship of David and Jonathan sprang, at once and full grown, out of their loyalty to Israel and their fidelity to the Almighty. The one was a king's son, and yet charmed to acknowledge in the other, who was but a shepherd lad, a greater power of friendship than he himself possessed. Jonathan did 90 not neglect his father nor his father's cause. He died at his father's side in the great battle on Mt. Gilboa seven or eight years later. During those years David had been driven to live as a freebooter. King Saul with insane madness had tried in every manner to compass his death. Jonathan compassionated his father, but never for once did he lose sight of the noble aim in which his friendship and David's had been cemented the future glory of Israel. That leads me to say that a true friendship is re- markable for the trust that pervades it. It is surely his own sentiment that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Polonius : "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel." And another of our poets says : "Judge before friendship, then confide till death." Have you a few friends in the world, say half a dozen? If you have deliberately chosen them as your friends, or if circumstances have gradually brought you and them into close and confiding relations, then your confidence in them should remain unshaken. The confi- dence that you have built upon them demands that. There is a cry that comes from within our nature which seems to say : "Do not treat them also as traitors. Do not throw your friends too overboard. Let it be known that there is a handful at least of your fellow creatures in whom you confide with unshaken firmness." The few friends of our choice are a sort of hostage to humanity. We have not opportunity to pay attention to all men, to do kindly offices to all men, to give unfailing confidence to all men, but if we can make ourselves realize the obligation of 91 doing so to just a few of the descendants of Adam, we give a positive proof that humanity is not wholly bad. Our friendsips are intended, in part, as opportuni- ties for the exercise of charity, as apportunities for frank, outspoken utterances. Our friends should be mirrors in whom we can see both our virtues and our faults. But how can we see either if confidence is lacking, or if we shatter the only medium which can truely reflect what we are? Friendships, viewed in this light, have at once a re- ligious, a Godward side. If we slight our friends also, then, pray, whom do we trust? If we cannot trust those who are closest to us, then how can we trust any of God's creatures ? How can we trust ourselves ? Nay, how can we trust God himself? To lose confidence in his work- manship is to lose confidence in Him. To assert that no creature made in his image is worthy of our trust is to call that image itself a deceit and a lie. That is a bit of logic whose truth none of us can deny. Let us then, I repeat, for our own mental and moral safety remain true to our old time, our long chosen friendships, and let us as soon think of betraying them as of denying God himself. I have but a word or two more. People who look upon friendships as a mere matter of convenience, a help to getting on in the world such persons are least worthy to have friends, such persons would be least likely to be true to their friends. These friendships, what then are they? What, if not God's means of doing good in the world. We speak sometimes of the "tender mercies and the overruling Providence of God," but what are they save "the cup of cold water handed to a needv brother?" How are we ever to do a deed to God unless we do it for and among our fellow men? Our affections are so many alabaster boxes filled with precious ointment, and when is there worth to be lavished if not upon those who love us and while they love us? Or think of all the most noble traits that have adorned or that can adorn our humanity, and what are they : charity, goodness, gentleness, faith, meekness ? What are they if not the record of the relationship in which we stand to our fellow-men? And what other channels or means has God devised for our perfection or the perfection of our brethern other than "gentle words and kindly deeds." Let us have a few friends. Let us love them gener- ously. Let us be frank to them and charitable, and let us beg them to be frank to us. Such friendships as that of David and Jonathan decide the future of kingdoms, such beautiful friendship as that manifested by our Lord Jesus Christ why it makes us see how very wonderful a thing friendship is and how through no other means has God ever intended to reach and uplift the world. Delivered in the Old Chapel, February 17, 1901. V. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF THE BIBLE Psalm i :2. The arguments why you should give the Bible your careful consideration are so many and so varied that I shall not have time fully to develop any one of them. The age of the book, the men who have written it, the characters drawn there, the truths taught, the men whose characters and careers have been moulded by it, the in- 93 fluence its teachings have had on government, literature, and life these, and more of like nature, are questions any one of which opens up a vast field for thought and for discussion. Here is a book whose authors range through more than a thousand years, a book which contains at least five of the very greatest characters known to history. These two points alone would make it worthy of consid- eration. Let me ask you to notice a few more specific reasons for the study of this Book and I will take as the first of these the form in which it is published. No book in the world is issued in anywhere near such large numbers. No book is published so expensively ; none at so low a price. More copies of it are given away every year than are published of any other book, even though you include the latest best-selling novels. It is the only book which is published in all the lan- guages, and nearly all the dialects, of the earth. There is hardly an insignificant tribe in any African jungle, or any poor reminant of humanity in any island of the South Sea, whose rude dialect has not been favored with the translation of a part at least of this book. It has caused to be constructed scores of written languages that it might publish itself in them. You can buy it in large size, finely illustrated, paying for it scores of dollars if you wish, or you can procure it in good clear type for less than fifty cents. One single house in London has, for two generations, made its fortune by the publication of the famous Bagster Polyglott Bibles. My first point then is, that a book which is so uni- versally used and which is published in so many forms and at so many prices is for that very reason, if for no 94 other, worthy of our consideration. Therefore to every young man who is starting out in life I would say : "Get a good Bible for yourself, printed on good paper, with good print, and good binding, good maps, and good ref- erences. Five dollars should buy a very serviceable Bible of that description. The margin of such a book may be used for jotting down any points of interest which you may find in your general reading, such as bear on any chapter or text. You may increase your interest in this book, second- ly, by regarding it, not as one volume but as several volumes of unequal value. It is a great, a very great, hindrance to the proper understanding, not to say the proper enjoyment of this book, to regard it all as one book. It is not one volume. It is a whole literature. It is divided into two general parts. In the first of these, there are thirty-nine different books by nearly thirty dif- ferent authors, and in the second division there are twen- ty-seven different parts by as many as eight different authors. Some of these books are history, some are poetry, some are impassioned eloquence, some are let- ters. But you may have been entertaining the idea that it is one book, that it is all equally good throughout, be- cause it is all equally inspired. Such a thought is mis- leading and dangerous, not to say impossible. I might declare, in like manner, that the visible universe is one book, equally inspired throughout. But have all men an equal division of it in its extent and intent, or can they have? Whose telescope has pierced to creation's out- most bounds? Whose microscope has fathomed the limit of infinitesmally little things? Whose brain has 95 found the subtle principles which bind the innermost and the outermost altogether to make one grand whole? If I arranged here on the platform forty books by different authors, you would know what I meant. Here they would be, the best representatives of England and America. But it would be foolish in me to say: "These are all alike good. They are all equally inspired. You must read them all. It is your duty." We should ex- pect a man to resent such advice as that. It would be taking his conscience away from him. It would be stifling his imagination. It would be depriving him of his judgment. It would be for A, B, and a few others to assist and dictate what is good for all the rest of the alphabet. But what would the wise man do and advise? He would pick up one volume after another and ask : have you read of the founding of Constantinople and the spread of Mohammedanism? Have you read the story of the influence of the English Bible? Milton's description of the loneliness of Eden and of our first parents? Park- man's account of the taking of Quebec? Motley's de- scription of the Spanish Armada? But how foolish the advice would be to ask him to wade through all of Shakes- peare or all of Gibbon. And so we are not to regard the authors of the Bible as alike good, alike comprehensive, and alike interesting, in every part, or to every person, or even to the same person at all times. The wise instructor would say to any young man, "There is much in the Bible which you will not like and which therefore you need not read." Leviticus, Chronicles and some other books are, in part or wholly, dry and uninteresting. The prophets contain sublime utterances, but to understand them one needs a 96 large knowledge of history and years of experience. Job is placed by many at the head of all literature, but its greatness looms up in due proportions only as men grow old and have given much study to the problem of living. Many of our Lord's words are mysterious and deep. One of his fellow apostles declared that Paul's letters contained many things hard to be understood. I have dwelt on this point a little longer than I had intended. Allow me a homely illustration in closing. When a farmer turns out his cattle to graze, even on the darkest night, he does not need to hang lanterns on their horns to enable them to pick out the herbage which is good for them. He does not need to go over the ground and cut down beforehand everything that is not grass. They know by an instinct within them what is good for them. And so with the Bible. If a man will but open it and that is the main point if he will open it, he will find what attracts and what is helpful to him, much bet- ter than any one else can find it for him. The Bible should be looked at, for the most part, as a series of biographies, a series of lives and letters, and not as a compilation of opinions and theology. I think that if this book were divided into different parts, and the several parts were bound according to their authors, that, even then, the average librarian or min- ister would put these volumes right in with theology rather than with history, poetry, etc., where they really belong. Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Paul, why they with- out doubt must go with Augustine, and Calvin, with Luther, and Wesley. No classification could be more in- consistent and misleading. Where do the works of Moses belong but with works of history ? Where should Job and the Psalms be put? On the shelves with Virgil, 97 Dante, and Milton. And so the Proverbs should be put with the essayists and practical philosophers, with Mon- taigne, Bacon, Carlyle, and Emerson. The prophets should be shelved with orators and statesmen. The let- ters of Paul, James, etc., should stand right along side of Cicero's and Pliny's letters. In other words, what is a record of life and facts should not be put alongside of what is mere discussion and passing opinion. Do not put what has gushed from the soul as naturally as water from a spring, what is sweet, wholesome, and life-giving, with what is often the offspring of hatred, the very marah of bitterness and controversy. There is an immense gain in treating the Bible as biography. As another has said, "It is the great lesson of biography to teach what man can be and can do at his best. It may thus give each man renewed strength and confidence." These brothers of ours, who live in universal life, still speak to us from their graves and beckon us in the paths which they have trod. And at the head of the bio- graphies stands the Bible. And what is it but a series of lives of great heroes, of patriarchs, prophets, kings, and judges, culminating in the greatest life of all that of the Lord Jesus Christ ? How many of the very great- est lives have drawn all their strength from the examples of holy men recorded here! What Moses accomplished was for generations the inspiration of his race and is still. It was the life and legislation of Moses which kindled the ardor of David and gave their glow of life and love to the Psalms. It was with David that Isaiah lighted a torch of a purer and holier fire. Jesus, our Lord, deemed it not beneath him to draw his spiritual life and inspira- tion from these his predecessors. And so absorbed was 98 Paul in one biography that he determined to forego all the unexampled training he had had in religion and phi- losophy and to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I say therefore again, learn to read this book as~real biography. Read the sketches of Joseph, Moses, Samuel, and David. Read the doings and the sayings of Jesus, and Paul, and Peter. They are not long, they are not tedious. Think of the whole life of Jesus Christ being contained in a few pages of a book as small as this ! There is another point: We should learn to read other history in the light of the Bible. With the Bible in our hand, we can best understand and fath- om ancient history in particular, though, in reality, modern history as well. You and I know well, that back there in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, civi- lizations and races have been extinguished. If we read the Bible, we shall learn why. There is hardly a hill slope more or less remote from the waters of the Mediterranean which does not present to the view some important ruin. There is a city in ruins and above it is an object the most sad among relics of antiquity. Within that temple, now in ruins, for generations, a crowding city of people, vastly superior in their intelli- gence, offered their worship to a goddess whose influence was as extended in those earlier days, through all those seas, as is the influence of Christ in this later time. But goddess and temple, city and worshipers are gone into oblivion. Read the Bible and you will learn why. Rome ruled the world for a thousand years and had come to boast of her rule as eternally secure. But the New Testa- ment will tell you why a revolution came, sudden, sweeping, permanent. And if you want to find why na- tions now do not succeed, why parties and men are doomed and damned, why an individual reputation and character shrivels all up to shame and nothingness, some- times within a few brief days, all you need to do is to go to the Bible and you will find an answer. In other words, history past and present, can be read best and interpreted best by the standards, of life or of precept which are written in this book. Within as small a compass, there is no source from which you can draw so full and complete an understanding of the history and the customs, the habits and personal daily intercourse of the peoples of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Daily, individual intercourse of men with each other in city, town, village and country, with their faults, foibles, and virtues are here drawn with the utmost sim- plicity and skill, a skill and insight so complete that we declare it of divine inspiration. One point more and I am done. The Bible is a book which is being constantly illustrated by other books. Using it as a nucleus therefore we get a broad and sensi- ble introduction to many other books. Walter Scott was a man saturated in history and in the customs of varied peoples and periods, a man who wrote works of fiction and history sufficient of themselves to make a respectably large library, and these are his words in regard to this greatest of books: "The most learned, acute, and diligent student, cannot, in the long- est life, obtain an entire knowledge of this one volume. The more deeply he works the mine the more rich and abundant he finds the ore. New light continually beams from the source of heavenly knowledge to direct the con- duct, and to illustrate the works of God and the ways of men; and he will, at least, leave the world confessing 100 that the more he studied the Scriptures, the fuller the convictions he had of his own ignorance and of their in- estimable value." And to scores of men, the holy will of God has been in all ages such a source of interest and comfort that no words could tell it fully. May it be ours with growing interest to seek and to find these hidden treasures more precious, as the psalmist declares, than honey and the honey-comb. Delivered in the Old Chapel, October 27, 1901. VI. HOW TO SPEND MY SUNDAYS "How should I spend my Sundays?" On this ques- tion people are divided at once into two hostile camps. That is because they regard this a religious question, when it is not such primarily. One party is afraid of losing the holy sanctities which have come to associate themselves with Sunday, the other party of losing the pleasures for which Sunday offers an open door. This is really a matter of business, one that concerns our inter- est, and our highest interest. Anyhow, Sunday is here ; it is legalized over all the civilized world, so that we need not raise the question where or when it originated. It is a solidly fixed affair. In the great French upheaval of the eighteenth century, al- most all institutions and customs were overturned. But the attempt to change the day of rest to the tenth day rather than the seventh proved impossible. In other words, the law of rest on the seventh day seems as indispensable as one of the great national laws. 101 It is well to notice this, that in our Sundays, we are allowed fourteen per cent, of all our time. On that day our usual employments make no demands upon us. No master compels us to work. We are under no task- master. On the first day of the week a man is his own master. He is lord of himself. He may do what he will with that day which is his own. It is really the only day when manhood and person- ality come to the top. On other days people stand in his light. Burdens, enmities, bickerings make it impossible for him to see properly either his neighbor or himself. He is twisted out of his normal nature and course. His associations carry him outside of himself. He has hard- ly time to inquire into his own motives, or to judge prop- erly the motives of other men. But on Sundays the rush of associations stops. The connection with the whirl of life is severed. Wheels do not buzz in the man's ears. Get him cleaned up and in his Sunday suit, and his personality, his real self, stands out a thing to be proud of. All this is true, as I have said, during fourteen per cent, of the man's time. This is a good bit, when you think it over. It is seven and one half weeks' vacation in every year. It is three solid years in every twenty- one, ten years in seventy. This is a good deal of time; how shall a man hallow it? Let us suppose that, at twenty-one, one of you is taken into a business at a thousand dollars, gradually to be several thousand dollars, a year. Let it be an essen- tial part of the contract that you are to reserve fourteen per cent, of your salary, that money not to be used for board, lodging, clothing, or for any of the necessities of life, but to be spent for your personal betterment for 102 entertainments, works of art, foreign travel, books. You see that every few years you could make an extended trip abroad, or could add to your library every year a hundred volumes or more of the best books, or could gradually adorn your walls with works of art, your room with things that would show your good taste. That fourteen per cent, of your income would be- come gradually a splendid test of you, as a growing, in- telligent man. It would gradually bring out whatever of refinement and higher qualities there might be in you. The other eighty-six per cent, would go for things scarcely under your control. It would be spent for things in which others would have some rights and some say. But the fourteen per cent, would become, in the end, a blessing or a curse to you personally. If spent properly and for the best things, it would, before you were sixty, have gained you a certain amount of advanced culture, a certain high grade of friendships and associa- tions, which would gradually make your personality con- spicuous, and your service to be sought after. Now our Sundays we are forced to look upon in just that light. They are valuable percentage of time, forced upon us, for our own disposal, time that cannot be used as the other six days are used. Perhaps I ought not to say cannot, for I saw a man making hay on Sun- day last summer within the limits of the city of Boston. The first point I would dwell upon is the Nature 01 Sunday rest. I will not define it at the outset lest you disagree with me, but I will lead up to it. We ought surely to agree on this, that how to rest and how much to rest are questions which constantly call for an answer. The effectual rest which a man gets is the thing which gives him renewed working power. 103 It is worth our notice that even the day laborer at present is working only twenty-eight per cent, of his time a little more than one-fourth. But it is plainly evident that a professional man, whose hours of compelled labor are less, has all he can do to keep up with the pressure that is put upon him. It would seem as though, with twenty-eight per cent, of labor and seventy-two per- cent, of rest, a man ought not to fall behind in working capacity. And yet men are falling behind. The age is overworked. More men than ever are breaking down under strain. There is with every year a greater pro- portion of the population in the insane retreats. There are more nervous people, more nervous diseases, more special remedies for such diseases. The question of how to rest, then, is a more and more pressing one. Occupations of all sorts call for all there is in a man and when the work of the day is done reac- tion comes, a reaction which brings the rest of sleep. The man falls into unconsciousness. His powers are relaxed. They are, in a sense, taken entirely out of his control. A sort of death seizes him. But during the working of this silent mystery, nature almost wholly regains her lost energies. Sleep is a sort of rest which even the slave and the draft animal cannot be denied. Mother nature rocks all her children daily in her quiet cradle and in that way cures the greater part of the cares and sorrows of the world. That is one kind of rest, a rest where the will is set free, and the whole being drifts upon the sea of un- consciousness. But that is not the nature of Sunday rest. Sleeping all, or most of the day, Sunday, or even lying abed late Sunday is not restful. Sauntering one's time away in fields or woods on Sundays I mean, of course, habit- 104 ually is not restful. Dawdling the day away in aim- lessness is not restful. A Sunday turned into sport, or visiting, or hunting, or idleness, is not the most restful way of spending one's time. I have no question that, if the indifference to religion, the causes of the criminality, and shiftless idleness that exist among us, could be traced out, a large proportion of them could be laid at the doors of men's Sundays and the way they have spent these Sun- days. Men fall into a loaferish habit on Sundays and breed thus a loaferish habit for the other six days, to say noth- ing of open sins and low companionships into which they are likely to fall. There seems to be a false idea and it is a very dangerous one that a man is justified in doing nothing at all on Sunday. But I know from personal ex- perience that that is a kind of rest which will, in the end, kill a man's capacity for the best work. You will find, in the case of any man who rests on Sunday after that fashion, that you have neither a great man, nor a good man, nor a growing man. Sunday rest is conscious rest ; rest that is taken with the eyes wide open ; rest from the usual occupations of the six days so far as such rest is possible. It is or should be a clean and clear-cut contrast to what is thought or done on any other day. That is Sunday rest. It is a thing to be looked forward to with positive pleas- ure, for this reason if for no other, because it is a strik- ing contrast to the other six days. The intelligent and mind I do not say the religious or the Christian the intelligent man should say to him- self : "I will, so far as possible, rest from every occupa- tion, even the most trival, of the six days." If a lawyer, let him vow not to read on that day in the daily routine 105 of his profession. The same if a physician, or teacher, engineer, or preacher. Let him vow that none of the things which he is engaged in studying or in investigat- ing on the six days shall find a place on the seventh day, but shall be utterly laid aside. This is not a plea for the Puritan Sunday ; it is not even a plea for a religious Sunday. It is a plea for a restful Sunday. It draws a line of demarcation between this day and every other day, by shutting the door on all the thousand and one things which make the six days such a babel. It is the rest of entire change not of un- consciousness, or of idleness. It can be taken in the crowded city just as well as in the country, because it is an inner rest a kind of rest that the man has made room for within himself. It is not the rest where activity either stops or slacks up, but where it develops itself into something entirely different. And we all know that an entire change of employment and thought is, frequently, the most welcome kind of rest ; even more welcome than entire cessation from work. Sunday, properly spent, should be a day of spiritual vision, a day of spiritual repairs. I can easily imagine you saying that these remarks have carted every thing out of Sunday, they have left nothing remaining in it. Suppose for the moment that that were so and that I should not further specify one single thing in which mind or heart should be employed on Sunday, would it not be enough merely to be still for a few hours and listen to the silent forces that are at work within us; to listen to the soul, if we have a soul; to hearken within ourselves and ask what the nature, the ability, and the possible destiny is of that thing within us which we call personality ; to ask ourselves of what good we are in the world, or 106 of what harm we are doing in it; to ask what injuries we are suffering during the turmoil of the six days; to ask what the general trend of our life is, whether better or worse? When an engineer has made the run from Harris- burg to Altoona, his machine is taken into the yard. She is put into the round-house. Her fires are banked ; her boilers and machinery inspected. She is brought back again, as far as is possible, to her ideal of perfection, to nearly the condition she was in when she first left the shops. She is burnished from pilot to tender. The en- gineer feels a silent sense of her capacity as she stands there at rest, though not a single force within her is in operation. Speed is hidden there. Thousands of miles are stored up in her. The engineer can see her speeding along the blue Juniata. The winter snows are flying be- fore her. She is winging her way under the showers of spring blossoms or the fragrance of summer woods. Thousands of happy hearts are sped by her to their des- tiny. Great engine! Source and cause of happiness almost illimitable ! But how many men are there in an audience, the average of whose intelligence is high, who thus every day or every week either find time or make time to look at the inner being, the self, the soul? They say you are preaching if you ask them to, or advise them to. They say you are fanatical or a dreamer, unfit for this practical world. But why any more so than the engineer who daily is obliged to overhaul his machine? On Sundays a man may look at his soul, that is, himself, in that way. He may look at the soul of man in that way. He cannot do this so well when the forces of the soul are all at work. From Monday to Saturday 107 decisions must be made amid turmoil and at red heat ; mo- tives cannot be nicely inquired into then. The surround- ings and the nature of things cannot be closely investiga- ted. The activities of the six days render all quiet thought almost utterly impossible. Those days give little or no time to inquire into or fall back upon general principles. Just as, while running his train, an engineer cannot pierce too nicely into questions of mechanical engineer- ing ; he cannot trace all the reasons of things as they are operating on this particular "run;" he only knows that he is not making time today. It may be the train. It may be the fireman. It may be the coal. It may be the atmospheric pressure. He cannot now tell whether it is any unseen trouble in the boiler or the machinery. All he can do is to make the specific forces which are at his control, work as well as they can on this particular run. When he comes to examine his machine, after her fires are out, he may find more serious reasons why she work- ed today so much below her capacity. Now, it is just so with man, when at work. Man engaged in the business of the six days seldom acts as a whole man, seldom acts at his best, seldom gets there on schedule time. In his six days' life man buries, wilfully or of necessity, nearly all those noble forces that are with- in him. He is worldly, selfish, inordinately ambitious, unfeeling, unscrupulous, and worst of all he is a mean coward. To see him in the six days you would hardly think he had any finer tastes, such as for literature, art, or especially religion. Probe any of the professions, any of the arts of life, during the six days and you would say : "Men are bad ; the world is rotten." A good way, in fact the only way, to cure this im- pression is to get a good square look at man, at yourself, 108 every seven days. You will find that this world is not so bad after all. The poets are not all dead. There are still musicians who sing or play well, and architects who build well, and philanthropists who are bearing up their fellows. The smoke and grime of the cities have not yet dimmed the sunsets nor smirched the flowers. The six days would force you to believe a lie. But a little noble reading and quiet meditation on Sunday will lead you into the avenues of a large and lovely world. You will find the world teeming with noble spirits. All is not crime ; even among squalor and poverty there are ample examples of noble living. On the six days men may say there is no God. They may act without reference to God. The poor and the meek are crushed. The rich and the pushing are exalted. But a little quiet Sunday reading and medita- tion will help you settle that question the other way. How came Joseph to sucess, or Moses, or Jesus, or Paul, or Luther, or Lincoln ? They certainly were not pushing men, in the sense you mean. But who has now greater honor? If you can find time, on the Seventh day, to look at some of these things calmly and dispassionately, you will find yourself wonderfully rested and cheered and calmed and balanced in your every day estimate of men. Let the seventh day speak to you of the larger, bet- ter soul there is in man; of the soul that has founded churches and schools, that has endowed universities and colleges, hospitals and libraries ; let it tell of the million- aire whose wealth has turned back in full tide upon the general public, not even asking a thank or a name to compensate for its untold gifts. Carnegie, Rockefeller, 109 Armour, Girard, Cooper, Peabody men are not wholly selfish. To make our Sunday then a hallowed day we must make it an affirmative day. We must build up the soul on the seventh day even though we demolish it the other six days. Deny, if you will, all good in man on other days, but on Sunday do the other thing : affirm all good and seek for and read of examples of it. There is no chance for spiritual vision on the six days, but get it the seventh day. There is no chance to stop for repairs during the six days, but do haul up for repairs on the seventh day. On that day do examine yourself whether you be in the faith. Do prove your- self to see whether you are reprobate. I have not been urging religion upon you. I have been urging upon you only the matter of rest, entire rest, from the occupations that employ you all the week. I claim that in doing so you will take up the work of the week again with far more zest ; while in the Sabbath hours thus spent you will be able to read and meditate upon examples which will instruct and mould the life. You will see the soul more fully and brace it up for con- tact with the world. A man who spends his Sundays in that way, will never need to ask whether they are making the best sort of man of him. That question will answer itself. In fact the Sunday was intended as the day which should both raise the question of how to make men better and at the same time should satisfactorily answer it. The man who spends his Sundays so, will find a strengthened moral tone. He will notice in himself an increased religious appetite. He will notice a more lofty and respectable estimate of his fellow men. He will take 110 his daily work more cheerfully. He will find his motives purified. He will not be envious of his neighbors. Such, as I understand it, is the hallowing of God's Sabbaths; such are some of the results that will flow from it. Preached in the Old Chapel, February 2, 1902. VII. OLD HOME WEEK Old Home Week is an attempt, as I suppose, to en- tice home the scattered and wandering children, the branches which have been severed from the old parent stock. The family tree, in many cases, has been reduced to a stump. It no longer grows as does the old elm in Squire Merrick's meadow; it is the source of indefinite cuttings which have been propagated elsewhere. An emigrant habit lies deep in the nature of our race, or of our branch of the human race. We are wan- derers from the untold past behind us. None of us could trace back more than ten removes before he would be drawn by his lineage across the Atlantic. We have all either landed at Castle Garden or come over in that largest of all ship's companies, the Mayflower. But milleniums farther back we were wanderers. Our forefathers left the uplands of Asia so long ago that we cannot fix the date nor declare the absolute event. We know it solely by a scant legacy of words which still abide, such as "father," "mother," "brother," "sister," "house." These testify a very early and common herit- age. By these we know that our fathers settled the peninsulas of Greece and Italy, that they crossed the Alps ill and the Carpathians. By these we can trace them to the western coast of Spain, to the promontories of Brittany and Normandy, to where the sun sets on Iceland and Wales. And the Atlantic proved but a temporary barrier. As soon as it could be traversed our fathers were off for new worlds. Ever in their eye there seemed, and there still seems, to be a fabled "Atlantis," a "garden of the Hesperides." The new world has fed the wandering spirit. The eastern water-shed of what is now the United States en- ticed the traveller on and up until land was cleared and peaceful farms were settled far up the Kennebec, the Con- necticut, the Hudson, the Susquehanna. Thus was the great Eastern water-shed surmounted and all that spacious country west of the Alleghenies laid open to possession and enterprise. To the wild Indian that great territory was all a sealed book. But what millions of wealth are now annually yielded from its limitless beds of iron and coal and from its vast acres of smiling fields ! What man with Aryan or Saxon blood in his veins could remain settled where such fertility, such resources, such scenery, lay open to his possession ? Yesterday at this hour I was riding through that sec- tion of Pennsylvania which was settled by the German refugees of the Thirty Years' War. A scattered, peeled, and harried remnant, how must their eyes and hearts have opened with wonderment and thankfulness as they traced the Susquehanna, as they traversed or skirted its sublime mountain walls, as they found in its rich deposits ample support for generations ! No wonder they became farmers, a "dumb" people, as you might say, with no commercial enterprise, with no literary tastes or aptitudes. But, oh, what a law-abiding people they were, and how eager, just as eager indeed, as the sons of the Pilgrims, to shed their blood in the maintenance of their liberties ! Their peace has been the natural result of the horrors they had suffered under Tilly and Wallenstein. Their old habits still cling to them and in many families the women, who are confined to home, still speak the rude German. But what is true of the Puritans and the Pennsylva- nia Germans is true of the descendants of all those who settled on the shores of North America. They are all wanderers and the children of wanderers. And, what is more, the spirit of the age forces us to be cosmopolitan. Distances have been nearly annihilated. Steam and electricity have wrought physical wonders. They have multiplied man's power at least a hundredfold. Innumerable centres of power are producing force and light and heat, and making our steel and textile fabrics, and the thousand and one things, yesterday luxuries, today necessities. In the depths of winter the products of spring are at our doors. We eat, fresh from the vineyards and orchards, the fruits of Sicily or of Cali- fornia. A man goes to bed in New York at ten and is ready to eat breakfast in Pittsburgh at seven next morn- ing. Single locomotives haul nearly 5000 tons. The compressor in the steel works at Bethlehem can exert a force of 14000 tons. But the greater marvel is the moral change con- sequent upon all this. The opportunity thus to see more of the vast spaces of the earth and more of the doings of men has an expansive power over a man's nature. It changes the circle of his friends and the tone of his morals and even his religious beliefs. Among new friends a man's faith in humanity is put to the proof and 113 in my judgment the nature of the true man becomes en- riched with a greater love and a larger charity. When he sees men standing to their duties after a new fashion, with less of fuss and outward profession, but with just as much tenacity and integrity, he himself finds new ways of attacking the problems of life ; and as he finds that, he discovers also an untold richness in the great underlying truths of religion, man's brotherhood, God's fatherhood. So, then, these increased facilities widen the heart's sympathies, until a man is no longer a Wilbrahamite, a Massachusetts man, a New Englander : he is an Ameri- can. And I tell you that is the greatest of all feelings, of all privileges. But some people are too clannish to attain unto it. I met an old friend of mine two years ago. He began to talk about the unusual advantages offered by Massa- chusetts and especially Boston. He called my attention to Concord and Lexington. He asked me if I had been into the new Public Library. I said to him: "What about Germantown and Valley Forge? What about the drafting and signing of the Constitution? What about Independence and the Continental Congresses? What about the great battle-field of history, Gettysburg? We also have made history." He said nothing. A few years ago, when East, I was purchasing some wearing apparel and while the clerk did up the bundle and we chatted about places, he remarked : "I am happy to say that I never lived outside of Newton." Understand, I am not finding fault with people. They should remember that not every man can live in Massachusetts, much less in Boston. Duty obliges some men to hustle and go. They are not contented to sponge 114 upon their friends. Perhaps they have no friends. They are obliged to get out from country and kin. But when such men get out of sight of land, get out on the boundless prairie, they find the cosmopolitan spirit exhilarating. And among the richest of their new acqui- sitions is a tide of religious belief which does not take its set from the beliefs of a few neighbors with whom they are and have always been in close and safe contact; but it is a tide that swells up out of the confidence that God is bountiful enough and loving enough to take care of them no matter how soon or how much conditions may change. The pastor resident here at the time of my removal called my attention to the fact that I was assuming great risks. I told him that my thoughts of removal were of some years' standing and that many things had led me to this step. He still called me rash. "If you were in the conference," he said, "it would make a difference." I called his attention to the man of old who went out "not knowing whither," yet I confess that, even while I plead my case, there were in my heart strong misgivings. I too am an emigrant and the son of an emigrant. But no man ever cared less to wander, no man ever suffered more from homesickness, or does now at times. But when a man comes to a crisis of duty such things are not to be considered. A kind neighbor said to me : "You will never sink as deep a tap-root in Pennsylvania." And I half be- lieved what he said. But I have not found it wholly true. Ten years have slipped rapidly away and soon an- other ten will pass, and I have learned that a man has no chance to think of tap-roots, of affections and states of feeling. He finds absorbing duties. He finds new friends who soon become dear friends. He finds others also who are suffering the same conditions of change, who are in partial exile, and the result is a bond of sym- pathy which is unique and tender. In the village where I live are at least two-score of New Englanders. What is more natural than that they should talk of old faces and old friends? These are the delightful bonds of our larger Americanism. We are not severed from the old by being brought into touch with the new. But while we argue for cosmopolitanism, there is after all "no place like home." The heart says that and says it all the time. There are no peoples in whom the love of home is stronger than in these Germans and Irish and English who for a hundred years have been building up empires toward the sunset and in the antipodes. Their domestic affection crops out in their love for their motherland ; it crops out in the names they give to their settlements, it crops out in the build of their dwellings, it crops out in their mode of worship and in their forms of government. And when these wanderers turn their steps home- wards, the home-places and home-faces seem trans- formed and glorified. There seems a sacredness every- where which was not there in earlier times. I visited my boyhood home after twenty-eight years of absence. A visit to heaven could scarcely touch me more deeply. The place where I used to play, by the brook, and on the hill-side, seemed unreal. When I saw men of more than forty whom I had left boys at twelve ; when I saw the parish church and school and the old familiar places, they all seemed unreal heavenly. Eight years ago, after only two years of absence, when I arrived in Springfield at three o'clock in the 116 morning and walked about the silent, vacant streets and read the old familiar signs, I could hardly believe that I had traded here and there so many years and known so many pleasant friends. When, later in the morning, the Wilbraham hills arose to view, it seemed nothing less than the touch of a magician's wand. I had always thought that Wilbraham was enveloped in an unusually spiritual atmosphere, but never as I did that morning. So much, as you see, does the cosmopolitan spirit enrich men's ideas. The new loves put the old loves a little farther back, a little farther away, and so the old love loses all but what is best and most precious in it. These children of the world who are privileged to wander back here today feel their hearts beat warmer, feel their memories quickened under the shadows of these hills and this old campus, with the sacred old buildings looking down upon us and the streets and homes re- peopled by the departed of other days. Our thought calls back again all our old friends and neighbors and compels them to play again their varied parts in life. It is no great task to travel in imagination today, starting at North Wilbraham and visiting from house to house, clear down to the Hampden line. It is not hard to repeople each household and bring back to their usual activities those who lie buried up yonder in God's acre, or down yonder in the lower cemetery or elsewhere where God in His providence has scattered them and planted them. The memorials of some were reared over their early youth and are long since moss-covered. Others left us but a few days ago. I wonder if any town could furnish a worthier com- pany or one that will be more likely to answer the first resurrection call? True cosmopolitians they were, in 117 that they had hearts to help all worthy comers from whatever quarter, and especially to help in the education of hundreds of young people, in a way quite as effectual for good as the best work of the instructor in the school- room. In saying this, I am thinking only of our fellow- citizens, whether living or dead, of whatever faith or of no faith. The men who ran their farms and drove their teams, as well as others; of the women who stuck to their domestic duties; of the homes which instructed children in integrity and duty. In these regards, and in proportion to its size, our town is not surpassed by any in this commonwealth. I take my hat off today, and we all, I hope, uncover, not merely to piety, to learning, to honored family record, or to wealth, but also to the memory of any fellow towns- man, however humble may have been his life, who was not afraid of work of whatever sort it might be, men who were slaves to work but not enslaved by work, men whose calloused hands and sunburnt faces were the proof that they had won a hard and an honorable living. These are some of the thoughts that daily and week- ly course through the minds and stir in the hearts of the men who have been scattered from Wilbraham and would like to return today but cannot: men in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon; men in Denver, Chicago, and Evanston; men in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; men on every continent ; for there is not a city nor a place I have named where I do not think of one or several who would honor this home festival if it lay in their power. I wish I were a poet with the gifts of Wordsworth or Tennyson. I feel a glory reflected from the hills, and 118 have for forty years, which I am powerless to express. The daisies, the columbines, and the roses have for years affected me as sensitively as the daffodils did the lake poet. I wish I could sing to the brook that slips out of the grotto and shyly hides in the pools under the brushes and crosses the mountain road and swirves down the pas- ture, issuing out again to add perfection to this scene of shaded terrace. And when it comes to the moral and re- ligious thoughts which were born here or fostered here, on that sacred knoll-top, in association with scores and hundreds who are now an honor to every state in the Un- ion, when it comes to these thoughts which revive here and now under these auspices, who can enumerate them? The occasions of good, the calls of duty, the association with those to whom the call of duty was constant and trumpet-tongued, noble teachers, companionable fellow- students how all this comes up before the memory! I speak from the heart today. If I were as rich as Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Schwab, Wilbraham Academy should have my first gift and no other school should have a larger or a worthier. I do not know that I would necessarily want the fact impressed that it was a Metho- dist school. But I would have a school which should vary as little as possible from the old spirit and the old traditions of this school, a school inspired for the future by its already noble record, a school where education was not beyond the purpose of the average man, a school open to girls as well as to boys, their privileges running head to head as they always have. This old school has been a positive blessing to the commonwealth for what it has done in that regard. Our American Union will never see the day when it ought to dispense with such schools. 119 Stevenson says : "We all belong to many countries," and he elsewhere says : "In one way and another life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships forever." It must be so. The great country in which we live is constantly exchanging its population. If a man can- not find work which sufficiently compensates him among old friends, he must seek new places and make other friends. The Pennsylvanian comes into Massachusetts. The Rhode Islander goes to Nebraska. There are the appointments of duty. But in these changes, you may depend upon it, we do not forget the old faces. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder ;" so much so, that we are filled with infinite delight when it is possible for us to come to such reunions as this. Today we look into the dear faces of many who re- main, and recall the lineaments of those whom we shall never see. We look into the expressive eyes of the liv- ing, we feel the grasp of their hands, but only to be re- minded more vividly of the vanished hands and the voices forever still in this world. We will carry the memory of this Home Week with us. God helping us we will not fall below the virtues of those who have preceded us ; God helping us we will each depart to his own place and take hold with good cheer of his own work ; and then, when our evening comes, we hope to have a place up yonder and to have earned it where "Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." Delivered on the Campus at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, July 29, 1902. 120 VIII. THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE SOLVED BY WORSHIP Psalm 73:17. The thought uppermost in many of our minds this morning is that this is the last Sunday service to be held in this place. We are at a point where to stop a moment and be thoughtful is not a sentiment but a duty. In some remarks made in this chapel last fall before a meeting of the Daughters of the Revolution, I empha- sized the fact that religious worship is a necessity to the full complete life of schools and colleges. It cannot be dispensed with even by schools that are undenominational. I showed at that time that exactly the same religious in- fluences are at work in the State Colleges as in the Church Schools, and also that the religious life in schools like ours has some advantages. The worship which has prevailed for a long period in schools and colleges of the English-speaking peoples has resulted in a peculiar moral and religious type of char- acter. If the Englishman and American are most enter- prising, if they have already taken possession of the largest portions of the earth; if among them prevails a greater liberty in politics and commerce ; if the unfolding of the world's nobler life may truly be said to be in their hands, and if they have shaken off in good part the fet- ters of barbarism and mediaevalism ; it is because of the marked moral strength of their public men. These men, nearly all of them, have imbibed their ideals of life and their strength in duty from the religious teachings of the school or college. A spirit of strong and sensible reliance on God, of devotion to the interests of humanity, ventures into the heathenism of Asia and into the bar- barism of Africa and America, seeking a market for its trade and at the same time spreading a knowledge of Jesus Christ. We call it the Anglo-Saxon spirit. And it is indeed the Saxon love of home, the Saxon reverence for liberty, the Saxon spirit of adventure, only upon these has been engrafted also the spirit of the religion of Jesus Christ, causing the Saxon home life to become purer, cleansing the Saxon love of liberty from the spirit of license, and freeing the Saxon love of adventure from barbarous rapine and butchery ; thus making the channel of universal brotherhood. Certain schools and colleges in England and America have been for many generations peculiar sources of moral and religious power. From the University Church of Saint Mary's, Oxford, have issued some of the greatest religious messages that England has heard since the refor- mation. The Chapels of the great public schools like Rugby, Harow, Marlborough, and Westminster, have been the places where England has built moral back-bone into many of her young men. From them she has sent forth a peculiar class into her court, her churches, her army and navy and her public life. Some of them one would hard- ly call religious men, though at the same time their whole moral nature was thoroughly imbued with the very strongest religious principle. Thomas Arnold stands among the greatest of the edu- cators of England. But though Arnold was a born edu- cator, it was, after all, in Rugby Chapel that he exerted his greatest influence. The Rev. Frederich Temple, late Archbishop of Canterbury, exerted perhaps as great an in- fluence when he was head-master of the same school. The boys who were at Marlborough during his master- 122 ship, will never forget the sermons preached there by the Rev. Dr. Farrar. The same might be said of the sermons preached, when he was head-master at Harrow, by Dr. Welldon, the present bishop of Calcutta. And in our own country certain colleges have been for five or six generations marked sources of religious and moral power, moulding from the very start our Consti- tution and our National life. That has been particularly true of Princeton where Edwards, Davies, McCosh, Patton and others have been towers of strength ; true of Obelin under the moulding influences of Finney and Fair- child ; true of Harvard which has enjoyed the teachings of the elder and younger Peabody, of Edward E. Hale, and Phillips Brooks ; true of Yale perhaps equally with Prince- ton, for the pulpit of Yale College gave the key to the re- ligious thinking of New England as did Princeton to the Middle States, and the South. Hence when Yale moved out of its old Chapel in 1876, President Porter took the occasion to trace the influence that Yale had wielded through such men as Fitch, Stiles, Goodrich, and particu- larly Dwight. We make no pretence to look back today over such a history. We are not denominational. This assembling- place has not been for religious use only. It has been an assembling-place only fourteen years. And yet it has had its steadying and moulding influence upon the moral and religious life of those who have volunteered to come or have been obliged to come and attend its worship. It has been my privilege to worship here with con- siderable regularity for the last eleven years, daily and on Sundays. I think that after thirty years of teaching I may speak with some authority and I say that after twenty-four years of experience in denominational 123 schools, I found the daily Chapel service in this place regularly and constantly far more orderly than any to which I had been accustomed. Indeed, it has approached as close to perfection as any such service could. So far as the Sunday service is concerned, I have never been in a place where I have heard Christ held up as our example so constantly and earnestly, never where I have heard fewer attempts to start difficult questions and make it hard for the beginner in the religious life. Certainly, during the fourth, fifth, and sixth years of my life here, it was my privilege to hear the most eloquent as well as the most instructive preaching to which I have ever listened. Those of us who heard them ought to thank God for the eloquence that came from the lips of Dr. John M. Gregory, and for stirring messages, greater always than his heart or head could hold of Dr. Law- rence M. Colfelt. It surely cannot be out of place to recall today many public occasions (Commencement and otherwise), when this room has been packed closely with people, Com- mencement Sundays, Commencement days, legislative visits. What uplifting messages have come to us, from Governors of Pennsylvania, from high officials of the State and General Government, from business men, from doctors of divinity, from heads of colleges and of universi- ties. I trust I am speaking with discretion when I say that we recall also today how, from time to time in this place, our honored President of the Board of Trustees has shown his warm love for the Pennsylvania State Col- lege, which seems much more upon his heart than his own alma mater; we recall how he has spoken to the mem- bers of the legislature, when here present, of the crying needs of our work ; how enthusiastic he has been in our 124 praise; and we also recall that he has not been afraid openly to rebuke us sometimes for our lack of college- spirit and high purpose. We remember also with what a steady and unostentatious purpose our President has managed from this centre our college affairs ; how he has here time and again unburdened his heart and laid bare his purpose for the future of the college ; how he has pleaded her needs; how he has seen her steady growth; and how finally he saw her, last June, reach the top of the divide, as we believe, and enter upon her larger future. Well assured may we be today in this house of worship that the Pennsylvania State College will never experience hours of harder struggle or of greater triumph than she has experienced under his leadership and from this place. We recall also other influences which should not be forgotten, for they have constantly rendered this service not only attractive but inspiring and helpful, the unin- terrupted fidelity of our chorister, the effectual help ren- dered by our choirs, quartettes, and orchestras. Nor would we forget that absent brotherhood part of them now a silent brotherhood nearly five hundred of whom have graduated from this platform our alumni. But what particular thing should we recall with most gratitude today? I speak now to those of us who have been through a series of years. Without hesitation, if I were to take my own thought to interpret yours, I should say, "the routine of daily morning college chapel." Some years ago I was at Durham in England, visit- ing its castle and famous Cathedral. I heard the tower bells tolling the call for vesper service. The constant re- currence of the sixth and fifth notes of the scale sounded sweetly on the evening air. I thought to myself then, "How beautiful it would be if one could thus get a few 125 quiet moments every day to worship God." But when I got back again to my school work in America, the routine of daily chapel led me to think, ''Here is what you wished for at Durham. You are here following in the foot-steps of those who established worship in the cathedrals and abbeys of the old world. They and their children have transplanted and continued here that daily service of worship and praise to Almighy God which is really the life of all high morality and the flower of true religion." When Yale moved into its present chapel a fact to which I referred a moment ago the President declared that the daily service had been held in the Yale College chapel with hardly an interruption since 1718, a period of a hundred and fifty-eight years. Think of the worship offered continually during all that time to Almighty God ; think of the sublime religious truths, the noble moral prin- ciples, kept constantly before the ever-flowing-stream of youth, and exemplified in characters becoming more saintly with age ; think of the prayers offered ; think of the varying outward circumstances; think of the con- stantly enlarging brotherhood of alumni ; think of the in- spiring record made by the living and of the honored roll of the dead ; think of the college-spirit gradually evolved ; and you may easily account for a certain moral atmos- phere not only peculiar to Yale but also to Harvard and other colleges. And today, from Appleton Chapel, from Battell Chapel, from Marquand and Sage Chapels are issuing influences which cause us to be hopeful for our best American youth and for the best interests of our country. Here, in other words, is the one truth that we have been slowly building up before you today : that the habit of daily worship has more power to establish and direct 126 a man in the true moral and religious principle than all the arguments in the world. Arguments do not often convince men. One man of intelligence seldom wins another over to his way of thinking. And, really, religion is not founded on argu- ment anyhow. It is an experience. It never can be, never was intended to be, a demonstration. Mathematics and science are in one realm ; philosophy in another ; and religion in still another. Begin to think, begin to act, upon the best religious truth you now know, and you will come to have convincing proof of all religious truth. "I went into the sanctuary of God," says the Psalmist, "then understood I." He had been puzzled thinking why wicked people prospered so. He had seen them well off in life and not afraid in death. He had seen others flocking over to their company and their habit, until he had finally begun to say : "Why should I have a clean heart? Why should I keep my hands clean?" He came, in other words, to that condition where his feet were al- most gone, when his steps had well-nigh slipped. "Until I went into the house of God," he says, "then under- stood I." He saw, as he worshipped with God's people in the temple, as he there contemplated in quiet their changing and eventful history through long periods, that the wicked are punished and that the righteous are re- warded, however many may be the apparently painful ex- ceptions. And that is what, at the very beginning of the chapter, and even before he has told his experience, makes him eager to utter the conviction: "Surely God is good to Israel, even to such as are pure in heart !" The thought we linger upon, as we worship regularly here today for the last time, is, that the problems of this life are solved most effectually by habitual worship. Our 127 ancestors knew this when, so long ago, they established it and because they have uninterruptedly followed the custom. In some countries of the old world France, for in- stance religion is altogether slighted or else bungled so that in consequence morality is low and government ready to fall. In some, as Germany, the intellectual side of re- ligion is pressed and as a consequence we have a strong established church, a people versed in the history of re- ligion and in biblical criticism, but not a people who are evolving many new religious problems or who are skilled in handling questions that tend to a broader relig- ious life. In the countries of South Europe the aesthetic and emotional side of religion is cultivated, and the re- sult is that superstition prevails and the light of truth cannot enter. But in the countries of the English-speaking peoples, where worship has been long established, a worship which calls into play the emotions, the intelligence, in fact all the faculties of man, a worship which has come to follow a custom fixed almost as the stars, a worship in which new phases of truth have not been feared and in which old truths have been dropped when their work was done here we find peoples solid in government, sound in morals, progressive and ever approaching nearer the truth in re- ligion. Ralph Waldro Emerson wrote years ago that Nature had adopted into its race the abbeys and cathedrals of England, "And granted them an equal date With Andes and with Ararat." And as truly may it be said that the loving God, our Heavenly Father, adopts into His heart and, so to speak, into His race, all true worshippers. 128 The crying need of our age, and particularly among men, if we may believe the reports, is the cultivation of the habit of public worship. The crying need in every private life is more prayer; more devoted personal wor- ship of God ; more time spent upon our knees and in the privacy of our closets. One hour a week publicly, is there any man that can- not afford that? Ten minutes privately every day you surely would not begrudge that. We are not asking you whether you believe in God, or the Bible, or have been brought up religiously, or have religious leanings or re- ligious antipathies. All we say is "Worship God." Just as surely as you begin and continue the habit, taking the suggestions of those who have had experience, and the guidance of the word of God, you may depend upon it that the result will be such a revelation of spiritual truth, such an increase of moral power, that you will wonder how this can be or whence it comes. You would not doubt me if I said, "Put your ear to the telephone and you may hear your friend five hundred miles away." You would not say, "But I do not under- stand electricity." If I said, "By boarding this train you may be in Pittsburgh in six hours," you surely would not say, "But I do not believe that such a ponderous train is run by steam as you say." I was almost about to say, "We do not care for what men believe, so much as for what men can really do." We talk of men understanding better the secrets of nature than they used to, but men do not know any better than they ever did, the mystery of atoms, of molecular motion, of wave-motion, of the source of life, of the sanc- tion of conscience. Man does understand better what can be done with these secrets of nature. He does put the bit upon them for his purposes, and that is the main thing after all. How long are you to wait until you see God ? How long will it be until you can fathom the mysteries of crea- tion and religion? Is it a century, a millenium, an eter- nity? The habitual act of worship will reveal to us the answer to all such questions. The worship of anything which we regard as super- natural, as greater than ourselves, is infinitely better than apathy, than no worship. Better worship a fetish than not worship at all. Even the worship of an Apollo and an Athene lifted up the taste and the culture of the world for all time to come, lifted it to a level never before at- tained and never since surpassed. But to say that there is nothing to worship to doubt to call everything in question nothing in all our nature calls more loudly for the epithet of "fool," nothing in our nature so revolts us. "Great God, I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." Yes, better that every star and the great sun were believed to be gods, better every mountain and stream and tree had its nymph or naiad, better that all nature were alive with gods again and Olympus once more reestab- lished, than have no gods at all and be left upon a ship- wrecked, stranded, pilotless world. It is worship, habitual worship, that reveals religion in man. It is by habitual worship that religion is purified and by it it shall reach its perfection. It seems that the 130 Apostle John in Revelation had pictured that last great scene of perfected adoration where he says : "And I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand and thou- sands of thousands ; saying with a great voice, 'worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive the power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing/ And every created thing which is the heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth and on the sea, and all things that are in them heard I saying, 'Unto Him that sitteth in the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honor, and the glory and the dominion, forever and ever/ " Our moving out of the old chapel should furnish us a useful lesson. All true life and all true progress is con- stantly moving out, is occupying a more extended terri- tory and coming under an ampler heaven. It is worship which thus enlarges mens' hearts and mens' horizons. The gift of Mr. Schwab is worth more to the college than ten fold the real value of the money involved, be- cause it enlarges the college's capacity, it enlarges its property, it enhances its outward appearance, it gives it already greater essential dignity. And do you not sup- pose that the gifts of God to us enrich us a thousand fold more? What a rich creation to an unfathomable depth lies all around us ! What visible beauties, what invisi- ble wealth! What a nature within us to correspond; What challenges every day and on every hand to ob- servation, to inspiration, to duty, and to truth! Under these conditions it will not do for us to be satisfied with present things nor with small things. 131 May God awaken in us all holy desires after Him. May we find our daily work and do it in His fear. Thus and thus only shall we come to the transformations which seem best typified by some winged things. We, like them, do but crawl at first, then by and by, like them we are wrapped in our cocoon or sleep of death, that most unpierced of all the mysteries, and who knows but, at the last, like them we shall be lifted up above the earth, our faith and purity having lent us wings, having trans- ferred us into spiritual being and angelic surroundings? God grant no secret thing may eat into our first estate and so render our last estate impossible. "Build thee more stately mansions, O, my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past ! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length are free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea." Delivered in the Old Chapel, June 7, 1913. X. PRAYERS Almighty God, in whom we live and move, we turn our thoughts and hearts to Thee, and pray for thy pres- ence at this hour. Heaven is thy throne and earth is thy footstool. The heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee. The nations of men are as nothing before Thee. Thou lookest upon the isles as a very little thing. Thou bringest princes to noth- ing and makest the judges of the earth as vanity. And yet Thou also visitest the earth and waterest it. Thine eye seeth every precious thing. Thou openest thy hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing. Thou visitest the temples reared to thy praise and even condes- cendest to make the hearts of men thy dwelling-place. We thank Thee that Thou givest life, and that to Thy highest creatures, Thou givest inspiration to the noblest life. Thou not only sustainest us, but arousest what is best in us of activity and excellence. We thank Thee that Thou hast so made the world that we, created in thy image, may find out its secrets, by patient thought and faithful effort ; may find inspiration and helpfulness on every hand, in every object and in every event. We thank Thee for the circumstances under which we gather today; that we are here to dedicate unto God and to the service of education this beautiful building, so generously given, so nobly planned, so faithfully con- structed. Bless us, Almighty God, as we thus come to take possession for Thee and for ourselves and for those who shall come after us. Yea, Lord ! and for those who have gone before us, also a part of that brotherhood which constitutes the College. We entreat thy blessing and thy presence, on this day and on all days to come, upon the life that shall centre here. May these beautiful and ample spaces be the scene of daily inspiration to all those who shall for years' pour in and out at these doors. May Thy presence be here on all the occasions of the future to hal- low and restrain as well as to inspire. May no unhal- lowed words be heard here. May noblest, most uplifting, truths be taught here. May those who are taught, may those who teach, may those who carry the corporate bur- den of furnishing and directing instruction, all, receive Thy inspiration and Thy grace, as they shall meet to wor- 133 ship, or to render any service of whatever sort, within these walls. We thank Thee for the earliest and the humblest at- tempts to furnish education in this place. We thank Thee for the location chosen ; for the lowly beginning ; for the first gifts ; for the earliest sacrifices. We thank Thee for the years of hard struggle and slow promise. We thank Thee for enemies as well as for friends. We thank Thee for the burdens borne all these years by faithful trustees and teachers, and for the loyalty and effective manhood of those who have been born of us and are gone from us. We thank Thee that some of those who have struggled the hardest and the longest are here today to reap a por- tion of the reward. We pray Thee, bless thy servant, the President of the Trustees, and all other members of the Board. Impart to them, we beseech Thee, with this large increase of prop- erty and of numbers, a larger increase of wisdom and dis- cretion, to guide the affairs of this College for the highest good of the students, for the best welfare of the State of Pennsylvania, and for the glory of God. Bless Thy servant, the President of the College. We thank Thee for the years of service he has rendered here ; for his continued health and strength ; for the strength of his purpose, the unity of his aims, the untiringness of his devotion. May he, in these later years, live greatly to enjoy some at least of the fruits he has struggled for ; and grant that he may experience no decrease of strength in these days when his burdens are so much increased. Do Thou bless, oh Lord, the heads of departments and the instructors. May they be learners as well as teachers, skillful to understand and patient to bestow the true wisdom. 134 Bless the students of the College, the graduates, the undergraduates and those who shall follow them. May they build for each other, and with each other, and with the truth into high living and noble purpose. And now, we beseech Thee, bless thy servants whom Thou hast made thy agents in this noble gift. May they, in imagination, look forward today, so far as weak human thought can, and forecast the wonderful results for many years to come upon thousands of young people, of the work which they are here doing for Thee today. Give them health and strength in their unusual position of responsibility and teach them that most steadying and helpful of all lessons, that they are Thy stewards, the al- moners of Thy bounty, channels for the transmission of the blessing of education and of the manifold grace of God. And bless, we pray Thee, all those public men who, in these later days, have, in the same manner, been made Thy agents in bringing good to their fellowmen, by dis- tributing their scores of millions to further the progress of education, philanthropy, and religion. God grant that they and we may not, in the splendor of the gifts, be blinded to the spiritual uses for which they are designed of Thee and to which they should be devoted. And now we would pray Thee to bless those who have toiled in dark mines, those who have sweat before the blazing furnaces, those who have sweltered in the fields under the burning sun, those who have fired the swift engine, those who have beaten against storms at sea, those who have labored in whatever sort to produce those re- sults of brain and hand which are the only true wealth. Let us not forget, wealthy though we are, wise though we are, powerful though we are, that without even the hum- 185 blest we are nothing ; for Thou hast made us all laborers dependent upon each other and honored to be colaborers with Thee. Nor would we forget to thank Thee today for the toiling, earnest age in which we live; for the purposes that are at work, however much they may seem sometimes to be "at cross purposes." We thank Thee that they are the development of the spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. They are men's birth-throes, the signs and tokens of the federation of the world. Cause us, therefore, Almighty God, to humble our- selves before Thee today in this beautiful hall; to bow down ourselves before the Majesty of the Son of God, the Son of Man, who gave Himself for us. Let us confess our sins. Let us haste to forsake them. Let us seek pardon and peace and perfection in his name; to whom, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, be ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and forevermore, Amen. At the Dedication of the Schwab Auditorium, June 1 6, 1903. O God, the only source of light and blessing, we thank Thee for the material of knowledge which Thou hast scattered abroad, and for the law of Wisdom Thou hast engraved within our hearts. Teach us the Master's principle of being willing to do God's will that we may know the nature of God's teach- ing. Bless all those who are in authority over us. Still cause Thy holy Church to protect and cherish the faith once delivered to the saints. 136 Illuminate the Schools and Colleges and Universities with Thine inward light, that those who teach may be taught of Thee, and those who learn may be led by the Spirit. Bless this College. Counsel its Trustees in their important trust. Bless the President who has given to it so many years of untiring devotion and who, through severe stress, has erected here a monument of which the State is forced to be proud. Restore him to such degree of health as may be Thy will for him, and in the hour of sickness or trial may Thy faith not fail him. Instruct by Thine own Spirit those who give instruc- tion. Help all the undergraduates to maintain the tone of the College by the purity of their own individual lives ! Prosper the Alumni and give them loyalty to their Alma Mater. With each new class may the College take on new life and, through new eyes, look yearly to larger ideals. Bless all friends and patrons of the College and all our visitors who are enjoying with us these June days. May the words of the Speaker on this occasion prove a persuasive message to higher living. Bless, we pray Thee, the graduating class. This is their day. Today they receive the diplomas, the outward signs, of faithful work. May they, from this day, enter into life so faithfully and continue in all good so persev- eringly, that, when God's day shall come, the day that commences our larger, immortal life, they may hear Thee say : "Well done." And to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 1ST will we ascribe all praise and honor and dominion for- ever and ever. Amen. At Commencement on June 13, 1906. Eternal and ever blessed God, we adore Thee, the Lord of heaven and earth, of whom and through whom are all things. We thank Thee for truths that confront the sense and convince the heart, for Thy glory which flames from sun and star and which is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, and made efficient by the Holy Spirit. Hear us, on this anniversary, Oh Lord, and bless us. Bless the friends and patrons and almuni gathered here in reunion, breathing this clear air and delighting in all this outward loveliness. Bless 'the honored mem- bers of other colleges who share with us in the enjoyment of this occasion. Bless especially this crowning work of the year, these rewards of labor, these duties ended, or to be assumed. Bless the undergraduates of this College and fill them with high purpose and firm endeavor. Give to the Fac- ulty true understanding which is the fear of God, that they may rightly teach others also. Bless the Trustees and the Executive Committee up- on whom such heavy responsibilities rest and have rested. God reward them for their fidelity and give them increase of wisdom rightly to administer the trust put upon them by the State and the National Government. And now bless especially Thy servant, the incoming President, this day to be inaugurated. Give him the loyal 188 hearts of the students. Give him the fidelity of his coad- jutors. Give him the hearty cooperation of the Board of Trustees. Give him the support of this noble Common- wealth. Give him to seek of Thee that true understand- ing which enlightens the mind and cheers the heart. Give him health, strength, and courage that he may prove him- self the very life of the institution over which he presides. Bless the class of 1908, who are to receive today their diplomas and to become alumni. God give them strength, each day in the future, to write better records and earn new diplomas from the esteem of their fellows and the character of their work. Be with them, we pray Thee. Hear us, Oh Lord, for those who are entering our Col- lege, the army of our supporters who are coming on. Make them yearly a better as well as a larger army. Bless all the institutions of learning and sources of education throughout our land. Bless our State and its Governor, our Nation and its Chief Executive, and hasten we beseech the coming of Him who by his spirit shall lead men unto all truth our Lord, Jesus Christ, to whom be all praise and honor and dominion forever and ever, Amen. At the Inauguration of President Sparks, June, 1908. X. OF WHAT USE IS AN OLD MAN ANYHOW? Genesis 47: 8 and 9, and II Timothy 4: 7 and 8. Of what use is an old man anyhow? "A rather strange question," you will say, "to ask a large body of young men." But I would not ask it if there were not something in it. It has been in the air since the early part of the winter. I have selected, for form's sake, two groups of words, one from the Old, and another from the New Testament. The one was spoken by a man who was one hundred and thirty years old, the other was written by a man of sixty- five. The one was spoken in a palace, in the presence of a king, the other was written in a dungeon by a prisoner in irons, in the presence of his keepers. Both are the words of men who had lived with all their might ; the one, a shepherd prince, had lived wholly for himself ; the other, a tent-maker, living from hand to mouth, had lived for others, had labored painfully hard, had suffered much, had travelled far. In the 47th of Genesis are these words : "Pharaoh said unto Jacob how old art thou ? And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, the days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life and they have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in their pilgrimage." Then in the later part of Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy are these words: "I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me 140 a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day." These words, so dissimilar in their spirit, are, in their moral attitude, exactly alike. Both men are reflecting on life. Life seems short to both. To both, life is a place of moral issues, where men do their duty or fail of doing it. That old lives have a supreme value in determining all living needs no arguing. Why does a man set out an orchard of varied fruit trees ? Is it because they will gladden the spring with the beauty and fragrance of their blossoms? Yes, that in part. Is it for their developing branches, their leafy garlands, their symmetry, size, shade? Yes, that also in part. But the main reason is the fruit they are to bear. He looks years ahead when he will have a large orchard or vineyard and a wealth of fruit. And every season he is careful for what the end of the season is to bring. One valuable fruit of an old man's life is, that he is reflective. He is obliged to look back upon the past and draw lessons from it, lessons which are bound to be turned to the instruction of younger life. It is different with the young man, the man under twenty-five. He cannot reflect much, because he has had but few changes and only a limited experience. He has not had much to think about. He has not travelled much, nor read much. He has lived, very likely, in the same place and been subject to much the same conditions. Death, he does not know much about, and to life he has been obliged to give but little serious thought. We do try to instill into the minds of young people many subjects that shall make them thoughtful. But, when all is done, they are not, and cannot be, reflective as 141 old men are. Life has to be lived before it can be medi- tated on or fully appreciated. Home duties get tiresome. School life is a bore. Sunday school and church going are insipid. It is because the youth has not reflected on what these things mean. Even in cases where young people seek a higher education they have not given such thought to it as their more mature instructors have, and those very disciplines which are intended especially to train them in good habit and religious living, those they often resent most of all. (A discipline like this, say, of Sunday worship.) If they were allowed to grow up as they would like, unadvised, untutored, unsteadied, by the recorded experience of older men, society would collapse by the third generation and anarchy would prevail. But again, men between twenty-five and fifty do not get much chance to reflect. To most young persons life is a subject neither of responsibility nor of reflection. To men in middle life, there are responsibilities, so many as to shut out almost entirely such reflections as are possi- ble to older men. They do not get time to read the larger and richer values out of life. The man of middle age must hustle. His strength is perfect. Blood is at full tide. Duties crowd thick and fast. Money is to be made ; studies pursued ; inventions perfected ; business en- larged; reputation and standing gained. The man in middle life is rubbing against other men. He is in the whirlpool of the world's work. Responsibilities in home, church, borough, state, crowd upon him. Talk to such a man about time for quiet reflection! How can he have much time for it ? Indeed why should the man in middle life look forward or backward ? He must do so to a de- gree in order to be safe and progressive. But to do so as an old man can, in the quiet of less pressing occupation, 149 with several hours at his command, these things are not for him. Perhaps we may say, they ought not to be for him. It is the active side which he must see, not as yet the moral bearings of things. Immediate questions of right and wrong, as of profit and loss, he must reflect upon daily. But daily they must have a swift decision. He must catch some precept from his boyhood, some warning that fell years ago from a mother's or a father's lips, a scrap from Bible, reader, or spelling book and he must put such senti- ment hurriedly into practice. He is not in a monk's cell. He has not time to be down on his knees with his Bible before him probing his own heart, leisurely and undis- turbed, until he has found and corrected the motive of his life. No. With a man of twenty-five to fifty, it is live now. Select your good quickly. Live with all that is in you. But now look for a moment at the old man, the man beyond fifty, how is it with him? The changes of life have gradually heaped up subjects for reflection. How many times has the scene of his life changed since he was a boy? How many times has he dropped one circle of friends and taken up another? How many times has he been lonely with the heartache under new conditions? Many of his friends of long ago have gone into the un- known, and with their going questions have arisen, pain- ful, persistent, and hard to solve. The life he has lived is constantly going through the mill of his mind. I wish I dared to sketch to an audience like this the reflections of the patriarch, Jacob. They are, in part, of too sacred a character. But look at this other man, a prisoner in the Mamer- tine, and only a few days from a felon's end. How preci- 143 ous Paul's reflections must have been. That day Christ met him in glory on the Damascus road. Ananias coming in to comfort him and the scales falling from his eyes. His summons to Antioch, and work in the first great re- vival there. The first missionary journey with Barnabas. Scores of towns in Asia and Europe where there were brethren loving him and praying for him and blessing him. Jerusalem, Antioch, and Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea and Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome, these are but a few of the many towns where he has seen men leaving heathenism and coming to Christ. He and Silas are singing hymns at midnight in the jail at Philippi, when suddenly the doors are opened and every man's bonds are loosed. The prolonged shouting for two hours in the theatre at Ephesus : " Great is Diana of the Ephe- sians." The more maddened cry at the castle of Jerusa- lem : "Away with such a fellow from the earth." But his own pen pictures are more vivid than any one else will ever draw : "Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a day and a night I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, of robbers, and of my own country men ; in perils of the city and the wilderness and the sea; in hunger and thirst and fasting and cold and nakedness." I appeal to you, is it not by such records, such mem- ories, such reflections, that younger men are educated and inspired to make a like noble record ? And does not an old man, in such reflections, live his life over again and live it better? Does he not forget the faults of the dead and treat the living with a larger charity? And are not such reflections on life applied, among all civilized peoples, with untold profit to the better education of the young? 144 And would not civilization wither from our earth were it not for the constant legacies of older men's experience ? Now the reflections of these two old men bring to our notice two things for which the soul is intensely eager, eager as for nothing else. One is that the soul loves to live. What does Jacob say : "Few have the days of the years of my life been." And what does Paul say: "I have finished the course." Both these men are looking at the same thought life and its brevity. Jacob of course looks wholly backward. His tone is despondent. He is doleful about the life he must leave. But Paul is joyful about the life he is to enter. His belief has taught him to look ahead and has left him hopeful. To Jacob the hundred and thirty years are only a few evil days. To Paul life is only a Greek race, four, six, eight laps nearly over and already the goal, the shouting, the laurels endless life. I say again: How eager the soul is to live! You may meet a man, so old, so disheartened that he declares he would rather die than live. Say to him : "We will fix your death then for tomorrow morning at nine o'clock." Would he be there? No! Not if he were a century old, not if he had lost sight and hearing and was without a friend in the world. No ! Not if he had seen only trouble and was now the victim of some dreadful dis- ease would he prefer death to life. If you think so you do not know how eagerly men hold on to life. And yet how shabbily men treat this thing they call life. Why do we not ask earlier and more constantly what living is, its nature, its top value? We are all the time facing "the skull and cross-bones." We must die, and all the points in which men differ : health and weakness, riches and poverty, high and low estate, all vanish in the 145 presence of the grim spectre, death. Pass a few years, and the longest life is gone. You look at these grey hairs and you say, "his career will soon be ended." I look at you, in turn, and with no humor, no sarcasm, I say: "Day after tomorrow, you too will be grey-headed." Just a few days it will surprise you how few and then, as we say, the laugh will be on you. You, in your youth, are like the man, who, for the first time, has a good square bank account and a cheque book. How comfortable it is to keep drawing out ! How important a man feels ! "Five thousand dollars !" Why should he stop to find the remainder after writing every check? But, ah, there comes a day when he thinks he will add them and strike the balance. He has left a bare hundred dollars. The sweat stands in beads on his brow. Where has all that money gone ? Every cent of that hun- dred dollars is more valuable in his sight now than every dollar of the five thousand was. Many men treat life in just that way until a bare fragment of it is left, and in that fragment they must learn, if ever they are to learn, what life means, and whether it has relations to other life in other worlds. And is it not sensible for a man to face early the question, "how shall I live?" rather than be confronted with the question, "why must I die ?" Jacob set the question aside. He had never deeply pondered it. Twenty, forty, eighty, one hundred and thirty, years he had lived. He had nearly exhausted his bank account. And now he thinks it has been short. He calls it a few days, and evil days at that, and yet it was nearly fifty thousand days. But do not be surprised that he calls them few and evil. Live fifty, a hundred years, more; and unless you have learned how to live, life will seem brief. Jacob 146 might have learned some of the same lessons Paul had learned. There was the same God in heaven. There were the same possibilities to faith. There was the same opportunity and need for prayer. There was the same opening of work and thought for others that door which opens to nobler graces, none of which he possessed. Why did not Jacob contribute something to the solving of this problem of life here and, possibly, hereafter? Certainly Paul was not more eager for life than Jacob. The patri- arch is as tenacious of it as the apostle. I come now to the other thing I had to say of the soul. It is eager for good. It loves to be good. Ob- serve yourself closely and you will find that the word "good" is on your lips perhaps as much as any other word. Every reasonable man knows that if you can be really good you will be truly happy. Just as food, air, water keep the body toned in life and purity, so precisely is goodness the tone, the life, of the soul. And yet it is a strange thing most men fail of be- ing good. There is only now and then a man who comes to the close of life whose regrets are not exactly like Jacob's. "EVll have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage" I am sure I say that. I feel that. It is what most men feel. A man's eagerness for life grows in proportion to his eagerness for goodness. Only as he is good, does he really live. Goodness is the most pure, the most gener- ous, the most comprehensive of all moral qualities. They are all embraced under it. It includes the thought of God ; obedience to the calls of conscience ; thoughtf ulness and charity towards my neighbor ; the rational use of my time and all my powers and privileges. H7 But look with me for a moment at Jacob. There is no life pictured in the Holy Book that is more selfish. I am not denying to Jacob strong, commanding qualities. It is not out of place to speak of God as the God of Abra- ham, Isaac, and Jacob. But look at Jacob. He cheats his own brother of his birthright. He lies to his aged father in order to rob the same brother of his blessing. He flees from home under a lying pretext. Some people incline to think that Jacob was converted when he saw the vision at Bethel, but his prayer at Bethel is a selfish man's prayer. And long after Bethel he cheats his father-in-law of the best of his cattle. This man is always thinking how Jacob's flocks shall prosper. During all his prime he sows the seeds of sel- fishness, and the reflections of his later days are melan- choly and regret. His thoughts look only backward and upon what seems a troubled dream. What a swift retribution had come to him when Joseph was reported missing. How that loss burned deeper and deeper into his soul for years. Jacob had put the finishing touches on Joseph. He had given special attention to the child of his darling Rachel. He had brought the boy up to love God without doubt or ques- tioning. Joseph's life is the most beautiful thing in old Testament literature. A business man would say that Joseph's life was Jacob's largest, perhaps his only, asset. But when the tragedy of Joseph's loss fell upon him, never afterwards did hope send a ray of sunshine across his face. These words here are spoken as he stands in the presence of the king, and in the presence of his son second only to the king. But he has brooded so long on the loss of Joseph that no power can raise him out of his settled melancholy, "Few and evil have been my days," 148 were the words of his lament. Why, the smile of God, like sunshine after showers, ought to have thrown sheen, and color and rainbows over his closing life. He ought to have looked up and exclaimed : " Goodness and mercy have followed me, all the days of my life." But selfish- ness had stabbed his optimism. He had taught his boy the comforts of Providence which he himself had failed to learn. And why should an older man expect the fruits of goodness and life, if his younger and his stronger days have failed to foster them? If we attach our hearts' affection solely to the things of this life and never look at their bearing to the things that may be beyond, why should not our hearts be torn when they are taken from us ? The man who all the time thinks of himself and his only; the man whose time is spent in building a fortune and a future for himself and possibly taking plenty of advantage of others in order to do it ; who is not scrupu- lous to do a sharp thing if it will add to his stock of money or influence, if this world is all to him, why should he not be dazed as it recedes from his view ? Such a man has never sought after the springs of immortal life goodness and the rich spiritual harvests that come of it. He has never fostered the love of God. He has never dealt tenderly with his fellows as Sons of God. Jacob's nature loved "goods," Paul's loved "good." There is the difference. One followed the naturally sel- fish nature. The other patterned after the nature of Christ. The one accumulated everything and in the end had nothing. The one surrendered everything and found all. Both men embody one and the same principle, one stated by our Saviour and embodied in every act and word 149 of his life: "Whosoever saveth his life shall lose it, and whosoever loseth his life shall keep it unto life eternal." Delivered in the Auditorium, May 21, 1905. XI. ACADEMIC FOUNDATIONS "Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on the life which is life indeed." I Timothy 6: 19. American Revised Version. If a person were brought blindfolded into our daily chapel and Sunday services here, he would, commonly, be unable to distinguish that the gathering was a college gathering or even a gathering of young men so seldom is the address made to you as men who are young, who are in a sense separate from life of the world, and in a state of preparation for that life; so constantly are you ad- dressed as men, men on whom rest now the responsibili- ties of life. On this first occasion of our college year, I shall de- part from our general custom in this respect and shall address you as college men, and in doing so I shall ask you to consider with me this question: "What is the nature of those academic opportunities which are pre- sented to men of your years, to men who, like you, come here or elsewhere for a something which seems of special value?" There are in Pennsylvania nearly seven millions of people. There are in the state forty higher institutions of learning, colleges or universities for men or women. These have on their lists something less than twenty thou- sand names. We shall speak not far from the facts if 150 we say that one person in three hundred and fifty of our state is enrolled in some college either in the state or out of it. The college students, as you will see, are a small proportion. What are the incitements, the advantages, which lead these few to go to college, to spend their four years of high school preparation, and their four years in college, to say nothing of a more extended education in profes- sional schools ? There surely ought to be some very sub- stantial reasons why one man in every three hundred foregoes for several years his opportunities of learning a trade, of getting practically established in some profes- sion or business. There ought to be some very convinc- ing arguments indeed to turn him from the paths of en- terprise now open to the multitudes of Americans, to cause him to tread the quiet paths of the recluse, to cause him to wait for years, to cause him to put out money without any immediate return, or hope of return. So that we are justified in asking: "What opportunities are offered him to warrant such expense and delay?" Look this fact also in the face. For every man who succeeds because he has been to college, there are not less than fifty men who succeed equally well, to all appear- ance, without the college. With a little pains you can make out a long list of names of college men who have made a brilliant success in all the callings and professions of life, but with no more trouble you can make a list equally long of non-college men whose success has been as great. A comparison of the two lists might almost lead you to say, "Where is the advantage in a so-called college course?" One incident might be recited which is really start- ling. Four men have, within a few years, set in motion 151 or given the impetus to the production of steel, and this on so vast a scale as to affect all the other industries of the world. None of those four men Frederick Krupp, Henry Bessemer, Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab has been a college educated man. Startling attention was called to these four men and to the influences, good or bad, set in motion by them in a recent number of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. It is an account that should set any college man to thinking. Any man who is so foolish as to consider a college education indispensa- ble, or to coddle himself because he is a college man, ought to read that account and feel humbled. . But the success of men who have been successful without the college, men who because of their success sometimes speak slightingly of the college, the succcess of such self-educated men has not diminished in the least the numbers of those who are attending college or who will attend in the future. So that still there is forced on us the question : What is the nature of those opportuni- ties which are given to a man at college, such apparently that they are appraised at an almost inestimable value, such furthermore that any self-made man, if it were possi- ble to retrace his steps, would freely embrace? As preliminary to two or three things which I shall say later let me now say this : That young men do rrot go to college to complete their education. They go there to lay the ground plan of it. They go there not to build up a structure of more or less varied knowledge ; they go there to find out or to lay out the foundation lines on which all later knowledge and conduct may be laid, and laid properly and consistently. I see before me here this morning one or two men who were present when Mr. Alexander fixed the ground- 152 plan of this building in which we are now gathered. It was done with a carpenter's measuring line. It was done with the utmost care. Every line was exactly the length called for in the architect's drawing. Every line crossed every other line exactly at the angle called for in the blue- prints. The whole ground plan was fixed exactly as the architect had arranged for with relation to the other buildings and walks in the immediate vicinity. All these lines and all their relations to each other and to other lines already fixed, did not vary a hair's-breadth from what the specifications called for. And can you not see what a difference it would have made if they had ? Any imperfection in the laying of the ground plan of this noble building would have meant lack of symmetry somewhere before the building was completed. But as it is, part answers absolutely to its opposite part. Line is perpendicular or horizontal to its neighbor line. You cannot put your eye anywhere and find a defect. And all that because of the exactness with which the original ground lines were laid. "O any fool could do that," you might have said, if you had seen it done. Any fool could more easily rear this superstructure, any or all of it, than he could do so apparently simple a thing as to lay the ground plan, so important a thing was that ! You are here to lay a ground plan somewhat similar. You have come here to learn to lay emphasis on a few great leading principles which are intended to dominate and which should control your after life. The things you are to learn, the subjects or matters which you are to store away in your memory, are as the small dust of the balance when compared to the cultivation of those lead- ing principles which underlie all true living. I will state 153 what seems to me those ground lines and state them in the order of their importance. First, you are here to form habits of mental indus- try. Second, you are here to confirm you loyalty to truth. Third, you are here that you may learn to put noble principles into practical applications. Lay this principle down first then, that you must learn to be mentally industrious. All of us are gifted with minds, but the feeble use that the great majority of us make of them is quite deplorable. Nine men in ten are not mentally industrious in any such sense as it is their privilege to be. A college education, if it does any- thing for a man, does this : It wakes him up to the fact that he has a mind. It arouses him to see the inner workings of his own mind. When his better tastes begin to be aroused, when his reasoning faculty displays itself for the first time in the easy problems of algebra or geometry, when poetry makes its peculiar appeal to him, and oratory arouses him, and scientific or mechanical ob- servations and laws thrill and inspire him, then it is that he awakes to see the value of mental industry, the value and necessity for mental alertness on his own part. If he reads books he marvels at the direct products that have fruited from the human mind. If he gives his attention to the problems that daily affect our human life, he is obliged to see that nothing has value except in so far as the human mind, human thinking, brings value to it. In proportion as the mind sees and foresees does it impart value into things, things spiritual as well as things com- mercial. I saw a piece of land, the other day, situated by the seashore, not more than four thousand square feet in dimensions, pure sand all of it and nothing but sand, as 154 far down as you had a mind to dig, and that piece had just been sold for thirty thousand dollars. A year or less ago there was no apparent value in it. But some mentally industrious land speculators held a conference with some other men, equally mentally industrious, who ran a trolley line. Together they thought out a situation, and together thought a value into these valueless things. Take a sample of the results within five or six years of such mental industry. Here is a town ; here already are thousands of permanent population, fine streets, beautiful homes, noble churches, school houses, banks and other public buildings, all the result of that original mental in- dustry on the part of the speculators and the trolley men. It has infinite results if you cared to follow them out. One man rides over the sage-bush region of Utah and Idaho and comes to a quick conclusion as he looks out of the car window. "This is hideous. This is the real desert. Nothing will grow here." He draws the conclusion, unlocks his grip and settles down to reading the last cheap novel. That is your mentally lazy man. But the mentally industrious man comes along. He finds an ample river flowing through this country. He taps the stream and in a box, or sluice, or trench he carries the water by gradual grade along the hill slopes. He irri- gates this alkali soil. Where there promised to be noth- ing there are now interminable acres covered with or- chards of peaches and apricots and prunes. There are apples that will sell in the London markets for a shilling apiece. Capital, always mentally industrious by the way, learns of the possibilities of increase and rushes in to in- vest, until in a few months flourishing times spring up out of the desert and the good-for-nothing land is selling by the acre at one thousand dollars and upwards. 155 And in our country as in no other on the face of the globe do there open up opportunities for mental industry. Out of the soil and the climate spring problems for the comfort and enrichment of every man who will think. Are these opportunities confined to any one class of men ? A brief moment of thought will tell you no. They con- cern all classes and all callings and all professions : men- tal industry on the part of the adventurer and pioneer; mental industry on the part of the civil engineer and the railroad man ; mental industry on the part of the carpen- ter and builder, and farmer, and trader. But if on the part of these, equal mental alertness on the part of the statesman, the missionary, the preacher, the teacher, the philanthropist, the literary man, the physician, the lawyer and of the countless army of skilled and unskilled labor- ers. "America is but another name for opportunity," and the man whose mind is actively at work on the varied problems that will naturally confront him will find ample material for success close to his hand whatever calling he may elect to follow. Depend upon it, you could not choose wrongly today, whatever calling you chose, what- ever humblest business you took up, provided you were mentally industrious in it. I said that you are here, in the second place, to con- firm your loyalty to truth. "What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." If any teach- er were confronted with the question, what is truth, he would find it hard, even at this late date, to answer. But are there not certain great general ideas which all the world really believes and acts upon, even though their beliefs may take varied form? Does not common sense lay hold on certain principles as in constant operation, on certain causes as being at the foundation of things? 156 And are we not to believe those few great truths which find a consensus, which are in real harmony, everywhere among men ? To those who have been reared under our civilization those truths are, in the main, the following: that an eternal, invisible God made all things and is over all; that Jesus Christ is the finest example in word or deed of any life thus far lived on the earth ; that the Bible is by all means the richest book now in existence on the whole subject of what we call divine Providence, teaching it by numerous examples as no other book does and incul- cating it by precepts and incidents which are as interest- ing as they are convincing; that according to that book he who obeys the voice of conscience and the law of God shall live; that he who follows the example of Jesus Christ, and he alone, shall lay hold upon the life which is the life indeed. Now one of these essential lines that you are to lay down in your college days, and that you have a golden op- portunity of laying down properly and well, is this line of reverence for these old and long established truths. Let them become ingrained in your nature. That is the in- tention of the daily morning readings of the Bible. That is the intention of these services held here on the Lord's day. They are to confirm and strengthen in you that loyalty to truth which has been instilled into you at home ever since you were born. You noticed, on the opening of college the other day, how our President, in a few words, laid emphasis on all those fundamental truths to which I have referred and which are contained in it. He did it, no doubt, that you might understand that the Pennsylvania State College stands on the side of and is in harmony with all the truths herein contained. 157 It is not uncommon for one to meet with cases of flippancy and shallow irreverence. Two weeks ago to- night I fell in with a person who said : "I don't believe in God, or the Bible. I cannot accept the divinity of Jesus Christ. There is no power or use in prayer." As soon as I could, for the expressions came out with mark- ed rapidity, I said : "Why you will be a faddist, if you don't look out. You are getting into what men call a cranky state. There surely is something," I said, "that you do believe, why don't you start with that, settle down on that? You are acquainted with the Lord's prayer, aren't you?" "Yes." "Could you write a better one?" "No." "You know that psalm which begins "the Lord is my Shepherd?" "Yes, I am not unfamiliar with it." "Have you any criticism to offer on it?" "No." "Do you recall certain scraps of the sayings of Jesus about 'laying up treasure in heaven' and about 'building the house on the rock and not on the sand ?' " "Yes." "Are not those sensible utterances?" "Yes." "You remember Paul's great classic on charity?" "I ought to, for I have heard it read a great many times." "Is there a flaw in it? Would the world be improved any if men lived according to it?" "No doubt of it." "Well now," I said, "there are some things that you do believe, why under heaven don't you let go, for the pres- ent, the things that puzzle you, the things that you can't believe and wont believe?" But I found in my opponent a perverseness of mind that was as stubborn and mulish as it could be, and that had not yielded in the least to what it had admitted was plain common sense. In a half hour or so, as our chat continued, my opponent came out with some very outspoken assertions in regard to Thackeray. He declared that no writer has looked upon human life 158 more sanely, or studied and understood its problems more deeply, or could be followed more safely as a guide on all great moral and religious questions. And then I said : "But have you noticed how saturated Thackeray is, in every volume he has written, with the Bible and with the homely principles it lays down ?" "Yes, I have and it has often puzzled me." And here ended a conversation which revealed a mind that had lost or claimed to have lost all its regard for the great fundamentals of truth, just because of a few puzzling questions with which all such truths must of necessity be surrounded because of their very nature. Let us, my friends, lay down the law and lay it down constantly, that those great truths which have been men- tioned are to be revered during our growing life, and that as we revere them, we shall grow into the highest, noblest manhood. I have not left myself time to do much more than to say, as a third point, that another of your precious aca- demic opportunities is to learn to put noble principles into practical application. To have noble principles in the head and in the heart is one thing, to put them into prac- tical application in daily life is quite another thing. In matters that are not spiritual or moral, we are wise in this regard and each of us is wise and shrewd to make use of the very best of all the means at his command. But how is it in moral matters, in spiritual matters? Men slide into habits that ruin body and soul. They know a thing is not good for them. They know it is ruinous to body and soul, and yet they are as eager after it as the moth for the flame. And if a fad of any sort will shield and protect them in an evil or low practice, they will adopt the fad and let the real sane sensible truth go to the wind. 159 What are these noble principles which we worship so in theory? They are nothing but truths which men have proven so in actual practice, and their golden value can never be discovered until they are reduced to practice again by us. The truth I preach or the principle I lay down can have no value to you, if you see me violate it in my own life. To win you to noble principle, I must my- self be an embodiment of that principle. But the limit of my time orders me to stop. College opportunities are such as to awaken in all true men their conscious manhood. College life gives you privileges and throws you into personal associations by which the life can be grandly enriched as in no other way. But college life is not a time to lay up stores of knowledge, as I have said. It is the time to lay strong emphasis on the elements of all knowledge, and, as I have said, it is the time to learn to work hard with our mind, the time not to be flippant with truth 'but to revere it, the time to act in our daily life and in the formation of daily habits under the motive and inspiration of such principles as the wisdom and experience of men have declared are for our good as they are for the good of all men. By doing these things you will be laying up in store for yourselves a good foundation against the time to come. Dr. Pritchett, of the School of Technology, in an address delivered before the University of Michigan in the sum- mer of 1905, said, among other things, this : "Today we need, in my judgment, to concern ourselves in the uni- versity with the spiritual side of administration. The first purpose of the University is not to further industrial development or to increase the wealth of a state, it is the development of the intellectual and the spiritual life." Delivered in the Auditorium, September 17, 1905. 160 XII. A MAN IS WORTH WHAT HE CAN THINK "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." Proverbs 4:23. These words mean "look out for your emotional nature and the words and acts that result from it, because of the influence, for good or evil, upon those around you." But it would not be altogether out of the way for us to substitute here the word "mind" for the word "heart." Then the words would read : "Above all else that you guard, guard your mind, because all that results in life results from that." "As a man thinketh so is he," is often quoted as a text of scripture. There is no such text. But if there were, it would be about the equivalent of what I have just read and it would mean that a man is worth what he can think. A man is not of value be- cause of his wealth or his apparent influence. He is of value in proportion as he can think with profit and safety to his fellows. It is this alone which gives character or determines fortune. It is not by good luck that a man gets as rich as the elder Vanderbilt, or leads the merchant princes of the world as did the late Marshall Field. Isaac Rich used to peddle fish in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Bos- ton. It was not luck that enabled him later to buy up all the fish caught from Eastport, Maine, to Point Judith, Rhode Island, to control the fish-market, and later to found what has become a great university in the city of Boston and to die a millionaire. Mr. Carnegie's wealth is not a windfall. A property he purchased not many miles from here rose in value ten fold. Why? Because he put thought into it. 161 Every man is a centre of thinking. He is always thinking, asleep or awake, from the cradle to the grave. And education, with the inspiration and help of religion, is engaged in making men thoughtful, so that they will gradually think accurately and with rapidity, with purity and originality. If you are properly educated, these are your stock in trade, your friends, your wealth, your pres- tige. The thoughtful man does not wait to find employ- ment. He makes it. Did you ever read of any one in a harder fix than Robinson Crusoe? He set his brain to work to find rescue, and he found comfort and happiness. He did some bungling thinking, but he got himself out of a hole. He shows us that a man can think himself into all the necessaries of life, all the comforts of home, all the consolations of religion, although he is alone with no man to advise him. I need not call your attention to the fact that the human mind is here and there and everywhere at the same moment : among the stars, under the sea, across the ocean, back in distant antiquity, or far off into the future. It is this horse broke loose that is to be controlled. The Spartan hero, Menelaus, was told that if he caught the sea-monster, Proteus, he could learn his way back from Troy. He went to the cave of the monster. The struggle began. It was a lion, but suddenly it be- came a leopard, then a wild boar, then a dragon, no, a stream of water, no, a tree. But he held to it and com- pelled its secret. Untrained thought is just like this. And we have first to check and hold it. This unbridled thought carries with it our secret and we are to compel that secret from it. We catch the untutored mind. We compel processes, we apply principles, until by and by, 162 this mind which we have trained knows itself and gains control over itself. I cannot trace the process except briefly. Why does a child first learn to read ? It is so as to follow a line of thought slowly and understandingly. Why take arithme- tic ? So as to think in numbers and about things. And why take algebra? So as to see the negative as well as the positive side of truth, so as to deal with symbols which require so very much more care. By slow steps come the processes of geometry, when lo and behold, the mind begins to see its own self, its own living process. Now all this is restraint and guidance. When this is done, or while it is doing, we introduce this same mind to the beauties of literature and art and to the delights of music. All this is an awakening, a restraining, a guid- ing process. It may be gotten in college and may be got- ten out of it. Those men like Mr. Lincoln who get the training outside of college halls call themselves self-made men. But whoever gets the thing is a self-made man. The process is not without difficulties and some men and women have toiled long and painfully to give the world the best that was in them. It took forty years to make Buffon the prince of naturalists. Walter Scott was for years merely a copying clerk in an Edinburgh law office. But the pains-taking drudgery made him the pains- taking writer and the sanest and most eminent of English novelists. Madame Sand wrote one hundred and thirty fair-sized volumes, every one of them a classic. Such are some of the services that may be rendered by a mind once controlled and trained, in college or out. But what do we mean by thoughts? I think most men here and elsewhere at first have the idea that to be thinkers we must be statesmen or lawyers, ministers or 163 teachers, poets or historians. We must deal with words. But engineers also are thinkers, so are superintendents and bosses of shops, and all intelligent day laborers, men who deal with things. A town, constructed of wood or brick or stone, built by masons and carpenters is just as much a series of thoughts as is the city that John des- scribes in Revelation, the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. Thoughts are not confined to words. Men can think steam engines, electrical appli- ances, house furnishings, and decorations. We say that Roman Law is a complicated system of thought, but so is the Pennsylvania Railroad. Justinian secured by his thought the formulation of the one, and by doing it brought security to all later government ; Mr. Scott, Mr. Thompson, and Mr. Cassatt have perfected the other and by means of it have given us cheapness, comfort, speed, and safety in travel. Look about you in this beautiful building. There is not an object in it that is not an embodied thought. The whole was in the mind of Mr. Hazelhurst, the architect, before it took visible form. Part after part gradually passed through and before the mind of Joe Alexander, the builder, as it took form. There is not a timber, nor truss, nor brick, nor tiling, nor plank, nor nail, nor light of glass, nor chair or any part of it that has not been through some man's brain. I am dwelling on this because of an infinite world of possibilities it opens up to us all. It is a consolation that we shall not be obliged to be maligned lawyers in the future, or weakling preachers, or poorly-paid school mas- ters. A larger world is open to us, and if we can give any useful thought a material form or do some act, however humble, which will please or give help or comfort, so far 164 forth shall we show our worth. Joseph Chamberlain has just been elected again to represent the city of Birming- ham in Parliament. It was his father's fortune that en- abled the son to go to parliament the first time, and the father got his fortune by the thought of a screw with a tapering point. I know a humble Irishman who earned an enviable reputation by tending a railroad crossing. It was a hum- ble thought but he put it into act. It was a grade cross- ing seven miles out of Boston. John Welch tended it every day in the week for over thirty years, and was not absent from duty a week all told in all that time. When the Albany Railroad sank its road-bed twelve feet, the old man's job was done. No man in that town was more honored, not for his private character, but because he had intended to keep that broad crossing safe from fatalities and really had done so for a generation. 'There is land to westward," said Columbus, and per- sisted in his thought. How long, toilsome, and saddening were all those years until they ended in the phrase, "Land ahead." That was his thought at last come true. It proves, as Lowell says, that "One day with life and heart is more than time enough to find a world." There is always opportunity to contribute a new thought. Roosevelt headed the rough riders ; John Wan- amaker thought the department store; John Fritz, of Bethlehem, invented the great steam compressors; Wil- liam Pepper enlarged the University of Pennsylvania; Charles W. Eliot revolutionized American education. In about fifteen years only William Rainey Harper walked to the head of our college presidents, founding the Uni- versity of Chicago and leaving it with a reputation and an endowment of seventeen millions. Was he a successful 165 man of business, or a successful president? What shall we say? We may say both, for he excelled in each. Think how the thoughts of our monied men are taking form these later years. Think to what uses Mr. Carnegie is putting his money, and of the future of the Rhoades scholarships. These are instances where new thoughts apply themselves to new opportunities, and things are done quite unlike anything men have previously heard of. But of course these are big opportunities and they open up to men of big means. Well, then, let us strike your level and my level. Every man can begin with soap and blacking. Every man can pay attention to the neat- ness of his own person, which surely is one of the speediest ways of conciliating other people's good will. Every one can give a thought to his own appearance, his own outward habits and so pave the way to other things. Get accustomed to thinking that men ought not to pay you above the value of your thoughts. If you can think only log cabins, they will not pay you the legacies that were given Mr. Richardson out of whose brain came structures like Phillips Brooks's Church in Boston and the noble Allegheny Court house in Pittsburgh. Suppose you have only a very humble thought, if it will benefit your fellow men or will advance your business by injuring nobody, why let the world have your thought. The world likes something new and will pay for it in money or in honor. Dennison invented tags to put on all sorts of articles. There was a fortune in it. An invalid invented the game called "Pigs in Clover" and so got rich. Day and Marten of London sent a man to write the adver- tisement of their blacking on the pyramids of Egypt. They set London by the ears at the insult, and so secured 166 which was their thought a greater market for their blacking. I have said, thus far, that a man is worth what he can think ; that he can and does think in things as well as in words ; that for this reason, an infinite world of possi- bilities opens up to men. And now comes my best thought, that a man all through this world must have respect for other's thoughts. What a record of his thoughts man has left ! He has catalogued the stars and knows their constitution. He has analyzed the flowers and classified the animals and put to various uses the minerals. He has delved under the earth and set in order its structure. He has found philosophy. He has written the Bible, the Greek drama, and Shakespeare. The ruins of his earlier greatness mark every continent of the earth. But his greatest thoughts have been respect to other men's thoughts. And the young man who thinks must learn that others think also. In that thought he will get both the good view and the bad view of men, will learn what they need and what they can do, will learn patience and charity. Is he am- bitious? So are they. Do his thoughts pass for learn- ing? So do their's. He must learn to wait. He must learn how to gain a hearing. If education and religion are seeking to spread their thoughts abroad, it is equally true that ignorance and crime have their thoughts and are more insistent to get a hearing. Look at established custom in society, in church, in state. Are they almost impervious to new thoughts? How shall a man who has a noble idea, as Jesus had, as Paul had, how shall he convince society that there is a need of his idea? Such a question as this is a 167 hard question. It calls for self-denial, for long waiting, and, like as not, for torture and crucifixion. There certainly are calls enough for wisdom of word. We never can have too many statesmen, or too many preachers, or too many teachers. And so too, we never can have too many useful appliances and inventions, too many of those practical thoughts that result in more comfort to our daily life. But we need the thought of charity more than any of these. We need an enlargement of thought toward others. We need to chastise envy and ambition in ourselves. Envy would trip up a man whose thought would make him more famous or more prosperous than we. Ambition would forestall such a man, even trample on him to attain its reward. These are days when a few men have gained enor- mous influence through wealth and the appliances that have enabled them to get wealth. Wealth so accumu- lated, especially when it combines with other wealth, does, after a time, set forces into operation for which no one man seems wholly responsible. The machinery, be it in business or in the churches, grinds on and overrides the thoughts of the competitor. It is blind, heartlessly so, to the benefits he might confer. The issues of life are so varied, the means and oppor- tunities through which we may be of service to our fel- lows are so unlimited in number that amid all this con- fusion of thought we need the thread of Ariadne to guide us. Serve your fellow men and obey God. That is the thread that will lead us through the maze of our mod- ern life. By determining to serve his fellow men, a man will think of good things, of helpful things. With such a motive he will fight against deceit in himself and in 168 others. He will argue for a good cause. He will preach a sermon full of his own sincere convictions. He will not write a novel down to a certain level where it will sell, but up to a certain level where every word and char- acter in it will elevate. He will do a good job. He will not need the eye of the boss to watch him, and he will not be watching the face of the clock. And if he obeys God he will learn the thought that the issues of life are in God's hands. In fluctuations of circumstances over which he has no control he will be calm, because God rules. The man that keeps his heart with daily diligence, whispers hourly to wit: "Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, think on these things." Delivered in the Auditorium, January 21, 1906. XIII. SUCCESS THROUGH MONOTONY "And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it: Whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice." II Kings 13:9. An old man knows the value of repeating a thing, of doing it over and over again. To a young, untried man such a repetition is often tiresome and monotonous. The old man knows that success in this world is likely to come through what seems to the young man mere humdrum. But notice first the pulse-beat of the universe is one unceasing monotone. It is that which strikes us more than any and all things else. We know not the essence 169 of the ether which pervades all space, but we know it pulsates in one unceasing vibration. The stars and planets in their turn return with absolute regularity. The seasons yearly renew their story, winter and summer, dreariness and cold, verdure and warmth, death and life ; so is the story repeated to a thousand generations. Niagara falls incessantly over its precipice and silently cuts the gorge before it. Its slow retreat goes hourly on for six or ten, perhaps thirty thousand years. Stand on the beach, and day and night you see its surf rise and fall, an unending roar on "the naked shingles of the world." Again, men come to love and trust in this monotony as they grow accustomed to it. They come to imitate it. How is it in our common life? In minor daily, apparent- ly unimportant, matters we depend upon the regular beat, the regular recurrence of the daily round. How else are we to know the truth of things ? There is no real truth in one event, in one occurrence, in one assertion. To know that a man is truthful, we must know that his word has been kept on several, on many occasions. We must test his invention or himself by repeated occasions. If we do not know him we require a certificate of him from some one whom we do know, so that by it we may understand that he has repeatedly done such and such things, things which determine his truth and fitness. We require this of man's works as well as his word, for his works are his words. What a man says must be proved true by many repetitions, and what he does, that which proceeds as a product from his hand, must be proved in the same way. Almost the first thing you be- come conscious of on an ocean steamer is the throb of the propeller. Especially is this true when you get out of sight of land and are settling down to the voyage. How 170 tiresome it then becomes! But let that throbbing stop, let it continue silent for a while and you will find your thoughts taking painful turns. "When shall we get to port? Shall we ever get there? We may drift indefi- nitely. We may never see the Old World." How com- fortable a sensation it is when you feel the pulsations begin again. The monotony is become the sweetest music. It is an inspiration to be well on toward the end of a long train and see perhaps two locomotives ahead of you bending around a curve of several miles. How playfully they seem to chase each other over the dreary spaces of Arizona or New Mexico. It is that graceful monotony of the "drivers" that gradually brings you over the thou- sands of miles. So as a traveler if you are well assured before the steamer leaves her pier, or before the locomo- tive leaves its station, that the machinery in each case Is in perfect running order and good for the day's run or the trip from shore to shore, why that assurance puts an element of strength into all your other plans. Just before I entered college, I bought a watch at second hand which cost me only twelve dollars. It was a Waltham, P. S. Bartlett grade, in a silver case. I had it twenty-seven years and the jeweler several times said, "That watch is worth a gold case. You will never get a better time-keeper." How proud a man is of such a pos- session ! And how natural it is that we should be proud of man's products when they harmonize with nature in their accuracy and their monotony of truth. Another point: Men always make their reputation and gradually determine their character and sometimes secure their fortune by the accuracy with which they re- peat themselves. You may perhaps recall the character 171 of Tim Linkinwater in Nicholas Nickleby. "It's forty- four year," said Tim, "forty- four, year next May, since I first kept the books of Cheeryble Brothers. I've opened the safe every morning all that time (Sundays excepted) as the clock struck nine, and gone over the house every night at half past ten (except on Foreign Post nights, and then twenty minutes before twelve) to see the doors fastened and the fires out. I've never slept out of the back attic one single night. There's the same mignonette box in the middle of the window, and the same four flower-pots, two on each side, that I brought with me when I first came. There ain't such a square as this in all the world. There's not such a spring in England as the pump under the archway. There's not such a view in England as the view out of my window ; I've seen it every morning be- for I shaved, and I ought to know something about it." Old Tim had grown to be the confidential clerk of the Cheeryble Brothers. And how pathetic the words really are. But many a man in many a town is constantly liv- ing the same accurate life. Being some years ago in the town where I had lived off and on for over thirty years, I inquired "Where is so and so?" "Oh, he is still alive." "What is he doing?" "Oh, what he always has done" To my certain knowledge he had for sixty years or more gone into the city adjoining, his whole duty to sell carpets, and that work he had done so monotonously well that for a generation he had brought the stream of trade to this place. The coat I have on was made by a man who has made clothing for me for over fifty years. I said to him three or four years ago, "Do you ever get to Boston?" "Well, very seldom." "You go to Springfield ever?" "Well, I've been there two or three times." No, he had never been out of the state. 173 But he knew clothes. He knew when a garment fitted. His trade brought him nice customers. He became man- nerly and informed and a perfect gentleman through daily contact with the very nicest people. But they had been drawn to him by the unceasing monotony with which he did business. For he was always there. You always could depend upon his unerring judgment, and you felt safe in his hands. You knew, when he said so, that you were well dressed, and that the goods you wore would do you service as he guaranteed. Now, I said that men make their reputation and their character and sometimes their fortune in this way. Notice how I put in that word "sometimes. 1 " In regard to making your reputation or character anywhere there is no question. You will make that and will not fail to make it, and you will make it by the accurracy with which you repeat yourself. If you have a work to do, always do it a little better than before, if you can. Always do it on time, always do it according to specifications. Never let the product fall below what you have done be- fore. Think of the scores of menial things that have to be done in any town or village. The man that can do some, can do any, of these with approximate perfection and neatness and care and reliability will surely win the good name. It may be only occasionally that a man's fidelity may win him fame and fortune. The opportunities, and hence the fortunes or the great names, do not come equally to all, but ought it not to be a pleasure, an inspiration, to know that out of our faithful monotonous doing of duty we can reap that which is, after all, worth more than a fortune? Does not the Good Book say that "a good name is rather to be chosen 173 than great riches and loving favor than silver and gold ?" But the loving favor each can win for himself. "The trivial round, the common task, Will furnish all we ought to ask: Room to deny ourselves, a road To bring us daily nearer God." Another point : The main duty of our life is to get into our monotony. We are preparing for life now. Our college courses seem to say and they make us feel that in a few months we shall be headed so and so. And doubt- less in most cases we shall be. Mechanical and civil and electrical and mining engineers, chemists, agriculturists, and here and there a teacher or a business man yes, I imagine that ninety per cent, of us will be doing pretty nearly what we had all along intended to do. But to begin and to settle down into the monotony of it is not a very agreeable, no, it is sometimes a very disagreeable, thing. I recall distinctly a young man who had given himself to the ministry. His work of prepara- tion for the profession went on unhindered. He was set- tled over his first church and it was a more than usually pleasant one and in a pleasant town and well located. But that town of five thousand inhabitants had not a half dozen college graduates in it. The people in his church were all working people engaged in shop or farm. He must preach to them, must visit them, must receive visits from them, must visit their sick and bury their dead. Oh, how hard it was to settle into the monotony of being a preacher to this people, a sympathetic pastor of such a people, how hard to settle to the level of their thought and conversation. The Greek any man has studied is of no value to him at such a time. The Latin, just the same ; and the French or German, just the same. People will 174 tell you that your Modern Languages will be of immed- iate help to you, but you will find them just as immed- iately helpful as the ancient ones. It is astonishing how much a man does not thumb dictionaries when he gets into real life. All his systematical theology, or theoret- ical chemistry, or higher mathematics generally has to make way for a religion that must apply to daily individ- ual cases and for specific problems, most of which are settled not so much by knowledge altogether as by a con- siderable degree of common sense. So that if a man has been sagacious enough to use his good sense during his college course and not wholly to forget it as men too often do, why such a man will gradually settle down into any new condition and make it profitable. But he will find a painful monotony at the start. Nothing will be as ideal as he had forecast it. But I have not a particle of pity for the man who must settle down to the monotony in new and hard con- ditions and with meagre pay. These things are as they should be. These untoward conditions are not untoward. They are the intended tests to his fidelity and patience. Under these conditions alone can he show the stuff that is in him. He can show the spirit with which he will strike and whether he has in him any of the qualities of which sterling men are made. No man is ready or worthy to receive the large recompenses and honors of life until he has been tested by some years of monotonous and perhaps servile responsibility, for only thus can his worth be known. But again the monotony must be that of a living, breathing organism, and not the monotony of a fossil. There are trilobites whose record is left only in the rock strata, while there were once others that lived and 175 breathed and moved about with the changing tide. You may split a stratum of rock and find the leaf or the bird track imprinted there. You thus open up a silent record hidden for centuries, one that might have been hidden for milleniums, monontony without life and almost with- out use. But look at the leaf on the tree or the bird on the wing. Monotonous is the leaf's unchanging swing. Automatically almost does the bird fly to its nest and re- turn. With the morn it unvaryingly begins its matins or makes the nighfall sacred with its note. How much more beautiful, more useful the monotony of the living than the monotony of the dead thing. The one is dead and belongs to a dead past and is sealed in a rocky tomb where it must lie in one unending monotone of silence, but the other is a monotony of life, of life that is a part of all living things ; of life that spends itself in contributing to the monotonous music of all living things; a monotony, the essential part of whose nature is to change with the changing seasons; to be green and full of life when the season comes, or to glorify the face of nature with red and purple and gold when the time returns ; to hurry with impatient and yet unerring wing when the snow line warns, or with the monotony of a like eagerness to build its nest and rear its young among opening leaves and fra- grant blossoms. Yes, nature calls us to monotony, only let us make it a monontony that is not the slave of mere habit, or the slave of our trade or our profession, not the slave to the hour of the day, or the department of work, or the com- mand of the man above us. Let us learn to go to our life and our life's work with the willingness to be commanded and yet not wholly yielding the desire to command ; with the willingness to yield to other's initiative where we 176 must, and yet not wholly losing a supple command of our own. The fossil man is the real hireling. He is content to be set in motion or at rest by the bell. His tale is so many bricks a day. He keeps the hours specified. If a professional man he talks in the language of the lawyer, or the doctor, or the preacher, and draws his fee. He feels all the conditions and yet he feels none of them. He is not interested either in your property, or your body, or your soul as a man with living, sympathetic habit should be. And it is this enthusiasm of interest, this eagerness for his work, that every man should bring with him into life and into what life lays to his hand. Any living work to be done in this world by any living man is connected by so many cords with the work that other men are do- ing, that, if a man's sympathies are broad enough and active enough, he can get discipline a plenty and accom- plishments the most perfect and experience and enjoyment to the full, if he will only render his service heartily and manfully and constantly and with sympathy to the whole organism of which he is an essential part. The old prophet and the young king. Let us turn in closing to this scene in the prophet's death chamber. Elisha more than eighty, for fifty years a prophet, was in his dying bed ; Joash, the young king, not over thirty, was untried as yet in the details of government. The old man resolute in death, the young king bending over him despondent at his death and crying out in the very lan- guage which Elisha had used years before as he parted from Elijah: "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof." The old prophet rais- ing himself in the bed. His hasty commands, one follow- ing another, to the king. "Take thy bow and arrows. Put thy hand upon the bow. Open the window; shoot 177 Jehovah's arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Syria. Take the arrows. Smite on the ground. Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then shouldest thou have smitten Syria until thou hadst consumed it." This is a scene, a scene of scenes, worthy of a painter. It is the old lesson of age advising youth, grey hairs on the one side, untried youth on the other ; the life full of years that has had volumes of experience and can almost read the future from the past ; the life that knows the value of conviction and decision and a high purpose. On the other hand is the untried life, the life that does not yet understand the values that underlie mere every day living, that knows not the dangers, the possibilities, the responsiblities, which are revealed to the eyes of the older man. Our conditions today are not dissimilar. It is an older man addressing several hundred younger men. It is not a prophet exhorting a king, and yet every grey- haired man has earned, by the experiences of a life right- ly lived, the right to be in part a prophet. Every young man has the possibilities that are kingly. It is not Syria and Damascus that lie outside the window there to be fought and overcome. No, it is not that; but it is life as it will confront us, nay, as it does confront us. When advised by those of experience to make issue with this life right now, to take life seriously, to strike with the passion of one who means to strike repeatedly and indefinitely, let us do so with the vigor of conviction such as shows that we believe in a real enemy and in a real work to be done and in a real ideal to be attained ; with a vigor, too, that shows we are bound to put in our strokes where the noblest before us have struck, and to continue, even at the 178 plodding humdrum pace, with the ideals that we have re- ceived from an ancestry of plodders. Brothers, let us learn to love the monotony of the stars and the seasons, the monotony of the birds and the flowers, the monotony of that thing which we call law, the monotony of conscience on the scientific side, but which, on the side of the heart, we know to be the infinite, unchanging love of God. Let us learn lovingly to contribute our share to this infinitely repeated pulsation of the eternal love. Let us learn to acquiesce in it, whatever be the conditions, under whatever skies, among whatever changes. Only frag- ments of the old Hebrew Melodies and the old Greek music, remain in the world, but they make that Gregorian music whose monotone and simplicity constitutes its grandeur, and separates it from the passing music of the hour. Let us catch the fragments, in the Bible or out of it, of that harmony which has always dwelt in all souls who have made the will of God their constant duty, the love of God their daily law. Delivered in the Auditorium, June 3, 1906. XIV. MOULDED BY AN IDEA. A Brief Memorial of President George W. Atherton. Very, very impressive was the face of our dead Presi- dent as he lay here in his casket last summer. It seemed not of flesh but of marble, chiselled by some contemporary of Phidias, and seasoned somewhat by the lapse of time. It showed us plainly this: that nature is a sure and effectual sculptor, that the thoughts and emotions of men gradually chisel themselves on the form and in the fea- 179 tures. The ugly face of Socrates was made attractive by his inner thoughts. In some of the faces of the early Caesars you can read the grandeur of the Roman Empire. Dr. Atherton was an unsually impressive personality. In a body of assembled college presidents he was second to none in this respect. An idea contributed to this distinction of personality ; the presence and constant operation of this idea rendered him an object worthy of careful study ; he showed himself one of those few very few men, whose characters will bear study, and which must be studied to be understood. The idea I refer to was this : He thought of himself constantly as the President of The Pennsylvania State College. This thought was uppermost in him always. If one did not get hold of this clue he did not understand Dr. Atherton. Many thought him enigmatical. Some failed entirely to understand him. To a few he was an- tipathetic, but it was because they had not touched him sympathetically in the idea that dominated him. After 1882, when he came to take charge of the work here, he was emphatically the President of The Pennsylvania State College. That thought moved, swayed, ruled and, toward the end controlled and wholly absorbed him. And let me impress this fact : He was not the Presi- dent of The Pennsylvania State College which he found here, but of the college which was to be here; the college which he has gradually been bringing here; the college which, in spite of slow legislation and opposition, is here, and is here to stay. A man coming here to a college so remote, so little known, so small, might easily have found it no great in- spiration. But he came to this little village, call it bunch of houses rather, with as much pride as he would have 180 gone to Cambridge or to the presidency of his own col- lege at New Haven, because he saw from the first, not the college that was, but that was to be. He lived not among the half dozen that were then graduating, but among the throngs that were to graduate. Pennsylvania was to his thought an empire. This was the most ideal location in it. From the start, he dreamed of its extend- ing avenues and walks and its noble buildings and throng- ing scholars. It was his Oxford, rather say, his Jerusa- lem, The Pennsylvania State College. I came here to see the college on the Saturday before commencement, 1892. For two hours and more, busy as he was, he went with me over the campus and among the buildings. He said : "I want you to go to my Mt. Pisgah," and he took me up to the top of "Old Main" and showed me "all the land of Gilead unto Dan." But what entertained me most was that I never saw in any man a greater enthusiasm for an idea than I saw in him that day. I have seen him on a thousand occasions since and I never saw him when this idea was not in his thought or when it could not be fanned suddenly into a flame. Furthermore, if you came as a member of his fac- ulty, he wanted the same idea to take form in you. He wanted the thought to dominate you as it did him. He did not want you to come with the feeling that we were small, that we did not compare favorably with other colleges. He quickly resented comparisons where there was the least disparagement of State. He would not ad- mit that we were second to any college in the land. And such thought will do most to make us the first. Any in- structor who could not grasp President Atherton's idea was not long retained on the force. He must have the 181 Doctor's enthusiasm and it must be real; otherwise his stay was of short duration. The same was true with students who were not sub- ject to rule, who disregarded the rights of property or in any way departed from true manliness. He had seldom forgiveness for them. He depricated their misconduct as a blot on our escutcheon, as an unclean page on the record of the noble institution which was in his dreams. And furthermore, this idea he honored in the pres- ence of all comers. It might be men from larger centres, from older and more renowned institutions ; it might be committees of legislature; whoever it was, he made no apologies for this college, although it had as yet no name. He gave all to understand that this college, in the spirit of its foundation, with the State of Pennsylvania to back it, in its location, and purpose, and outlook, was second to none. This then was the idea that dominated Dr. Atherton. Notice it in its operation and effects. For the last seven years of Dr. Atherton's life I was thrown into very close and tender relations with him. I saw his heart laid open scores of times as no other per- son did. I had the opportunity to test the sincerity of his motives and the nobility of his convictions, probably more so than any other person, and to me his life grew more and more beautiful and rounded to completeness. It is not yet two years since I asked him one Sunday : "You are not in doubt as to the great fundamentals of our holy religion?" He answered me with the tenderness of one making a confession of faith and the tears were in his eyes. I believe that he felt himself president of this college under God, and sought to be ready at any moment to give an account of his stewardship. 182 Look back upon him now in the light of these thoughts and see him transfigured. Personally, how neat he always was, and gentleman- ly and affable and considerate of others; consciously a man every inch of him, every waking hour. Seldom was he seen on the village street except as an most regular attendant on church when the college was not in session, or doing his duty as a voter, or attending perhaps some burial. He was thoughtful toward the poor as toward the rich, and as considerate of the employees of the college as of its faculty and students. In the silence of his office he was quietly and unselfishly making a college and making a village while others were studying how to make some- thing out of the college or out of the village. In his conduct as a president his ruling idea was al- ways to the fore. At Sunday service he presided with a quiet dignity uniform on all occasions, almost to the least motion. No outside matter or announcement was al- lowed to mar the order of service. The doctor of divinity or the plain parson alike spoke without any introduction, even on commencement occasions. In that way each ser- vice was a worship of God, not of men. It was the divine service of The Pennsylvania State College in dignity and orderliness unsurpassed anywhere in the land. The same was true of the daily chapel. He never failed to at- tend it and it was a source of much pain to him that any one needed to be exhorted to attend this service of a great brotherhood worshiping the divine Father. Ruled by this idea he presided over his faculty with promptness. He came usually full of business and des- patched it rapidly. If he were gone six months, in six 183 hours after his return he was acquainted with all the cur- rent details. The position of such a man, seeking to convince leg- islatures, to guide the counsels of trustees, to harmonize the differences among schools and departments, to co- ordinate departments in such a way that each shall have its related place and share, to bear with as well as to in- struct the great body of students, to keep in sympathetic touch with the patronizing public, such a position requires great generalship, and herein his ruling idea served a noble purpose. With that pride he was beginning to see fortune smile at his long endeavor. How richly he enjoyed see- ing his earlier dreams taking shape in the buildings erect- ed in the early nineties, and in this Auditorium, and in the Library, and McAllister Hall. With what pride the last months of his life he stood in the anteroom here and looked out upon what God had wrought. He had been the unswerving optimist through it all. His optimism was already making his dream a substantial fact. Then came the shadow, the shadow into which we all must enter, and he passed as cheerfully into that as he had previously travelled through the sunshine. I had occasion to follow him with the depest sym- pathy as he went to California that last winter. I could see him moving about Los Angeles or riding down to the pier at Long Beach. I have brave accounts of him. The noble idea of more than twenty years was still regnant in him. It healed all wounds, compensated for all burdens, and reconciled him to withdrawing his hand from the lever he had managed so long. 184 No murmur of impatience or regret fell from his lips during the long weeks of his last illness. He was cheer- ful. Instead of needing cheer he cheered those around him. He passed into the shadows embodying until the last, the idea which had controlled him and which sees us here today. He had never brought shame upon that idea, but always honor. It was that idea that carved the lines of strength and grace upon his features; and that same idea, ruling in us, students, and teachers, and trustees, and friends of the college, will make us an institution honorable and to be honored. Delivered in the Auditorium, May 26, 1907. XV. HONORING ONE'S NAME "And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered, speak; for thy servant heareth." I Samuel 3:10. How many instances we find in the Bible of men called suddenly by their names. God calls to Adam. Abraham is addressed abruptly. At the burning bush is a voice: "Moses, Moses, put off thy shoes from off thy feet." And on the way to Damascus there was heard a voice: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" There is a deep significance in many Bible names, and the circumstances under which they are given are sometimes of thrilling interest. Take, for instance, the story of the naming of Ichabod, given in the chapter fol- lowing that of the text. A battle is in progress between the Israelites and the Philistines. The Israelites have sent hastily to Shiloh for the Ark of God in hopes that 185 it may give them victory. Eli, the priest attendant on the Ark, is ninety-eight years old and cannot hurry with it but goes part way. His daughter-in-law accompanies him. Her husband is with the army. The priest and the woman have stopped to rest by the road-side. The butchery of battle is going on not far from them. And yonder is dust in the road. A messenger quickly comes up. He shouts aloud into the old man's ears : "Israel is fled before the Philistines. There has been a great slaughter. Thy two sons, Hophni and Phinehas are dead. And the Ark of God is taken." Having heard the last words of this awful climax the old priest falls backwards, and his neck is broken. The dreadful news brings to the woman the sudden pangs of child-birth, and death follows in a few moments. Nothing can cheer her or retain her in life. When asked what she will name the child she replies : "Call him Ichabod the Inglorious," meaning "the glory is departed." Artlessly natural are the stories of the naming of Samuel and John the Baptist, John the Beloved, St. John Chrysostom, John Huss, John Calvin, John Wesley. Picking up a book of genealogy the other day, I found the name John given to the first-born son for five gener- ations in succession. In Bible times names were given to commemorate some event, or as a prophecy of the future. And in many cases the name made good. Abraham proved to be "the father of a great multitude;" Israel was a "prince of God;" Joshua proved a "deliverer;" and what shall we say of Jesus, for that is the Greek way of spelling Joshua, Jesus, that name which is above every name? "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for He shall deliver his people from their sins." Has not He made good the name given 186 Him ? May we not reasonably say, "There is none other name under heaven given among men" ? In our time also care is usually taken with the choosing of a name. The name of some beloved and honored relative is passed on with pride. There is given to the child some name from history or literature, a favor- ate with the parents, and believed to carry inspiration for a noble life. And in nearly all cases the naming is done formally in a church and is attended with baptism. The giving of a name to a human being is a sacred thing. It is not like naming a dog or a horse. There is solid rea- son for giving a name to a man or a woman. The name brings personality and dignity and responsibility. And yet how many of us have ever dwelt seriously upon the names which we bear? How many of us have ever called ourselves by name, have ever spoken to our- selves as though we were somebody else ? The name we bear is worth repeating aloud occasionally to ourselves. That name is to cling to us as long as we live. It and our character are gradually to become one. We are to make or to mar our name. It is that we must answer to at the roll-call of God. We cannot escape or easily change our name. When a man becomes a criminal he sometimes changes his name. I have understod that some corporations designate their employees by number rather than by name. Can we think of any deeper insult that could be offered us than to take away our name and designate us by a number only? Should we like to be criminals and obliged to assume a new name in each new place to avoid the penalty of the law ? Let me dwell on the fact that a name brings out a man's personality. Our personality is our crowning gift. It marks us out and distinguishes us from everybody else 187 even from God himself. There is a sort of royal feel- ing attached to our personality. We have a right to feel as proud as our proudest neighbor, and when our best impulses awake in us we do not want to be anybody else. That is manliness, personality. I think too that a man's real individuality often con- fronts him for the first time some day while he is in the act of writing his name on paper, slate, or blackboard. I recall distinctly such an occasion in my own life while I was yet in the grammar school; the time when I began to write my name with consciousness and pride and care, in the stereotype form in which I have written it ever since, for nearly fifty years. That was the awkening of my personality ; the arousing of my pride to be somebody, to get an education ; the desire to draw away from harm- ful influences and to seek nobler ones. And I am convinced that none of us do anything as we should do it until our name stands out so as to confront our attention. "Samuel, Samuel!" Why, no wonder the child awoke and ran to ask Eli what it meant. And Eli's advice was full of insight and truth. Eli had not succeeded in bringing up his own family of sons. They could hardly have been worse than they were. But Eli knew that the voice that called was the voice of God, and he wisely gave Samuel advice what to do. For every man "the voice of conscience is the voice of God." When a distinct utterance calls within us and says : "Do this. Dbn't do that," it is the call of God to our personality, and if our personality responds to the call it increases daily in what is its best good, because its best good is its truth to itself. To arouse a man's personality is to give him dignity. It is to separate him entirely from other men : to make him stand out by 188 himself ; to make him realize that being somebody is just being himself. It is not my birth, nor my natural gifts, it is not my possessions, or my friends, or even my opportunities which are the things of most importance to me. It is the thing called myself. When I have grasped that idea and learned to make the most of it I can make opportuni- ties, I can rally friends around me. Even gifts themselves can be enlarged indefinitely as soon as I learn to know that / am ; that / can be good or bad ; that / can be gener- ous or mean ; that / can store up knowledge or can live and die a fool ; that / can live so that when I am gone my name will be honored or execrated. But such a personality and dignity entails a great responsibility. I have a friend who for twenty-five years has been in the banking business and at the head of a clearing house. It is said that if you could take his signatures for all those years and put them one upon another they would exactly fit each other. He knows the responsi- bility that goes with signing his name to a draft or to a check or, in fact, to any piece of paper. Weight is given to a name which is signed with such uniformity. Such signature means integrity and security. It becomes a solemn seal. But when we play with our names, which leads other people to take the same liberty, how can we feel quite the same security? In the last fifteen years I have received checks made out in more than a dozen dif- ferent ways. But when the bank where I keep a tem- porary deposit makes out a draft for me, it is always with my name fully and properly written. And that is the way to write it. It makes men feel that you are acting 189 knowingly and conscientiously, that you are treating yourself with dignity, that you are not slurring things. How the circle of one's personality and responsibili- ty is widened by the name. Think for a moment of the Post Office Department of our government. Of what use would it be if men had no names? How long could its work go on ? In fact how could it go on ? All the mil- lion articles which the Post Office handles bear a name. Suppose I write five hundred letters a year to friends in various parts of the world. The thing will cost me not much more than fifteen dollars, and yet my influence is extended indefinitely, just because of the value and con- venience of a name. For more than twenty years I had corresponded with persons whom I had never seen, whose voices I had never heard. They had become as dear to me as if I had met them every day. Their correspondence, backed up by their signatures, had become an indispensable part of my life. I have had quite a close touch wtih many old stu- dents. I have given them much advice whatever its worth may have been. I have received heaps of comfort from them. But it is really our names which have car- ried the consolation. Our names have extended the radius of our personality and given us a power otherwise impossible. And, do you know, in that way words are photo- graphed, just as persons are or as landscapes are. I found only a few months ago a letter written to me by an older brother of mine forty-five years before. He had gone to the West Coast. He was getting started in work. I was trying to get an education. He had en- closed me fifty dollars and said that more would be com- ing if he succeeded and if I needed it. The long years 190 had passed and all these things had escaped my memory. But there was the letter, and there was the signature, pre- cisely as he has written it to this day. I should think it sacrilege ever to part with that letter. In a few years, perhaps months, some of us will be only a name. I was in a southern city a few days ago, jostling others on its busy streets, my ears dinned with the activities. In a few minutes I had left the electric car and was in a National Cemetery where fourteen thousand Union soliders are buried. There, row on row, stretch- ing on indefinitely over many acres were the little stone markers with nothing on them but a number and the man's name and regiment, or, just the one word, "un- known." Well, soon all our activities will have been reduced to a name. It will not be long until our visible, tangible, person will have dropped out of sight and all that will be left will be our names and the character that attaches to each. Not one man in a million needs an expensive me- morial. A marker with just the name is enough. How significant, in the corner of the old burying ground in Philadelphia is the inscription : "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin, 1790." Knowledge and imagination can write in the rest. All that we leave behind us is the name and the traits that are attached to it, and the greatest men succeed in clearing their names so that they are known by them and them only: Phillips Brooks, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Lincoln, Gladstone, Victoria. Small men hunger after titles and are anxious to be known and have all their titles written out. But the greatest men slough off all that sort of thing. 191 How things will stick to our names when we are gone yes, while we live also. Dip a magnet into steel filings and see how they stick to it and radiate from it. There are a few hours during which a man is being consigned to his mother earth when we touch upon the better side of his life only. But let the days go by and gradually what the man really was is what he will get credit for. His failures will gradually come and stick to his name like flies to the paper. Was he sel- fish, was he unfeeling, or was he sottish or brutal, did he neglect the finer feelings, did he disregard the common courtesies of life? people will know about it. Yes and they will know if the opposite things are true, if he were generous, if he were patient, if he were charitable, if he cultivated the religious sentiments. And one of the strangest things in the world is that to such a name as Washington there are added every de- cade new glories. The moral treasures stored up in the crude and unlettered Lincoln keep coming, yearly, more and more into the light. On the other hand with the ad- vancement of mind and the progress of true enlighten- ment such names as Napoleon and Caesar lose their charm. The contemplation of a good character is like the cutting of a diamond. The more work put upon it, the greater is found to be its value. The colored people have a hymn whose refrain runs like this : "When the general roll is called, I'll be there." Does not the Bible say : "Every one of us shall give an account of himself to God?" You ask me if there will be a last day, and a last judgment, when every man will be called out by name to give an account of himself. I never 199 like to answer such questions. The man who wants them answered would not be satisfied. I do know this : every day is a judgment day ; our life is a continual name-calling. And every call ought to meet its ready response. "Samuel, Samuel!" "Here am I." "Saul, Saul !" "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" You see in these Bible calls, how ready each man is, when he hears, to obey. And I believe that the march of human progress gradually tends toward this : a time when men will hear more distinctly with their con- science and will be prompt in their obedience. Let me say in closing, that these calls spring up in every man and on all occasions and in connection with all duties. We need no burning bush. We need not to be struck down in the road or caused to see a light above the brightness of the sun. What we need is faithfully to fol- low the inward voice. Shun the evil and choose the good and do this in every calling and every event of life. It was the midnight call to the little boy that gradually led on to make that little boy, Samuel, the most honored of all prophets. Let us ask Him to say: "Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth." Delivered in the Auditorium, September 20, 1908. 193 XVI. CONSULTING OUR FEARS "And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which ye saw by the way of the mountains of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us; and we came to Kadesh-barnea." Deuteronomy 1:19. Kadesh-barnea was near the south border of the Holy Land to which the Israelites were marching from their Egyptian bondage. It was but a few days' march from their destination. At this place occurred one of the greatest defeats, without a battle, recorded in history ; for from this town the Israelites turned their course back to wander nearly forty years in the wilderness, hundreds of thousands of them leaving their bones to bleach upon its sands. So that "Kadesh-barnea" may well stand for "borrowing trouble" and may teach us the evil result of following our fears. (i) I notice, first, that these people lost their pur- pose ; they became aimless. With all the enthusiasm of success Moses had broken the connection of his people with Egypt. In the grey dawn of that morning when Pharaoh and all his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, when they felt the freedom of delivery, the possibility of being lifted into a nation, then it was that the Israelites were first warmed with patriotic fervor. These Israelites, now, could sing the praises of God with timbrel and dance. It was the awakening of a religious and national consciousness that led them to break forth in words like these: "People shall hear and be afraid. Sorrow shall take hold on the 194 inhabitants of Palestine. Fear and dread shall fall upon them. Thou shalt bring the people in and plant them in the mountains of thine inheritance." This was an ancient "Marseillaise." It was young patriotism, but pitched in the highest key. But what a contrast at Kadesh-barnea ! Moses has sent out twelve spies to view the land. The people have had their wish. Moses and they have consulted doubt and fear. They are anxious to see all their troubles in a piece : "the land, what it is ; the people that dwell in it, whether strong or weak, few or many ; the land, whether good or bad; the cities, whether tents or strongholds." When these spies return, two of them have the courage to say, "Let us go up and possess the land for we are well able to overcome it." But the ten say, "We are not able to go up against this people. They are too strong for us. The people we saw in it were of great stature. We were in our own sight as grasshoppers." Perhaps they called this prudence. But where now was their purpose? Contrast that morning battle hymn with language such as this, "Because the Lord hated us hath he brought us forth out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites and to destroy us." Pitiable words! After all they have seen and endured they are ready now to turn back and to make bricks under the burning sun of Egypt. The past sordid and bitter as it has been is preferable to any future they can think of. Here is a whole people aimless, in danger of rendering the generation that follows them, and, in fact, all future generations aimless. Such an attitude meant more than death in the desert to a million souls. It meant the death of a great movement, a stoppage of moral good that might affect a thousand generations. 195 But take, please, a noble impulse of any sort and it is most difficult to start it in man or woman. Religion and education, the influences of church and school and home, are constantly bringing inducements to arouse in the young the striving of a high aim. But oh how slow we are to get an idea of what God wants of us or of what our friends want of us, or of what we really want of our- selves. But sadder even than such cases are the instances of people who have made a good start towards a better life but who suddenly come to Kadesh-barnea, fall back, join the aimless and unknown. They had a wish to better themselves, but in an unfortunate hour they have seen more difficulties than duty required them to see. And so they have given up all further attempt. Just this moment some difficulty has come that seems insuperable and be- cause of that all effort and endeavor end. There are many of you listening to me now whose past life became to you only a few weeks ago, perhaps a kind of Egyptian bondage. The farm, the shop, the store, the village or town, yes even your home, became an irksome restraint. Some appeal came to your better na- ture. You were stirred by some book or some life. It is under such influences that men are forced out into achievement and greatness. But such awakenings lead straight into difficulties and dangers. These are the price we must pay for the excellence we would win. I have seen men start to get an education almost wholly under the influence of a dream. Hardly a dollar in the pocket; working every spare moment ; dropping out to teach in the winter ; get- ting deeply into debt ; making poor progress in their work, and finally arriving at "Kadesh-barnea." Health gone, 196 money gone, no power to earn or borrow, they suddenly arrive at the "mountains of the Amorites." They send out spies to see if it will pay. They side with their fears and surrender. College men come to this sort of Kadesh-barnea. They find the course they had chosen is burdened with studies too hard to carry. They have been here only a few weeks or perhaps a year and oh, it seems so long to look to the end of the course. A lucrative business op- portunity opens up. Why should they longer pursue the object of their dreams ? Perhaps they have not "made it" in some subject or subjects at the end of the second month. That is not always the Kadesh-barnea though to some fellows. It is the man who wants to look a long way ahead, who wants to see all the giants, who wants to cross all the bridges at once, and borrow all the trouble in a piece, and fight all the battles in a day. And that is the most painful period in a man's life : the day, the hour, when, for some reason that may vanish in a few hours, he concludes to slacken his hold upon the purpose which has long inspired his nobler moments ; just because, at present, something blocks the way ; just be- cause at present, the road goes through the mountains so that he cannot see it, or because a fog has settled on his path. Some years ago a young student came to bid me good bye ; his funds had given out and he was going to give up. I said : "Going to give up? And you had intended to go into an honorable profession? You thought you had some aptitudes for it? Now you will go back to your job in the paper mill ? Look about," I said. "Do not go for a day or two." He took my advice and he found a 197 way, and for four years afterwards, and entered the pro- fession to which he does honor. If your purpose is of any value at all you must not be too easily scared out of it. One of the things which makes a purpose worth anything is its future promise. Because of what there may be in it a man should wait a long time before he gives it up. In struggle there is the best kind of education. But, in aimlessness what is there ? Our confidence is shaken in the man who fails to do what he had set out to do. What it would have cost him, we do not reckon with that. All achievement costs, even the retaining of what we have achieved. Inventors must guard against infringements. Writers must protect themselves by copyright. Moneyed men must worry over investments, and professional men over their positions. If the faint-hearted or incompetent were justified in go- ing back, there is scarcely one of us who would not sur- render at once rather than toil on. But we do toil on, because there is time before us. There are expedients. If not by this road, we may gain our object by another. If it is dark today it may be light tomorrow perhaps the next hour. But to be aimless! That is to be mere animal. It is to forfeit God's nature. A man is great by his very God-likeness. He is great by the truths he imbibes ; great by the purposes that stir in him ; great by the labors he assumes; great by his willingness to sacrifice; great by his power to wait; great by his cheerfulness under diffi- culties. (2) By their cowardice, they caused their past ex- perience to become valueless. An intelligent man lives mainly on experience; first, on that of other men which serves as an inspiration, and then upon his own exper- 198 ience, which is his diploma and recommendation. He needs a chapter here and there of what other men have done in order to give him a start. But it is not very long, if he is a true man, before his own experience is of most service to him, and is really his best capital. How many books have been written to inspire young men and women, books on "Self-Help," on "Character," on "Duty," on the "Pleasures of Life," on "Success." But after a man once really catches their inspiration he seldom finds time to read even such books. He has not time to take lessons from other folks, his own experience is piling up so fast. I really feel a heartfelt sympathy for scores of men who do not seem to find time to read even the Bible itself. Business pushes them. The interests of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are all bound up in them. Competition requires painful alertness. New openings demand new and immediate thought. Each night has made additions to what they know and can do. New experience finds new uses. Gradually such fidelity and application tell. They are serviceable wherever you may find them and they may be transferred wherever you will. And that is the value of all experience. You can pack it into a letter of recommenda- tion. When a student comes here he brings his certificates. They are the chapters of his past experience. Read closely they are a sort of palimpsest, for underneath their fair characters we can read the headaches he has had in mathematics, and the tears he has shed over his English spelling and over those dates that concern the landing of Columbus and the Pilgrims and the founding of James- town. Yes, these certificates are his past experience. They give him the right to continue his experience here. 199 While he stays here he piles up more experience. Term by term his history is growing in the archives of the col- lege. If he goes out into the world he may, in an emer- gency, fall back on this college record. If, after years of labor, he wants to transfer his services elsewhere he simply carries his recommendations. These set him up at once in a new place as permanently as if he had always lived there. "What has this man learned ? What has he done? What are his aptitudes?" These are questions constantly recurring in regard to persons of all ages, all ranks, all callings in life, and a man's past record makes their answer more nearly possible. It is this past ex- perience, stored up as it is in books or antiquities, which saves the world from wasting its time in further experi- ments. But if a man at some time in his career comes to Kadesh-barnea ; comes to the hour of deep discourage- ment ; comes to where the "blues" seize him and hold him as in the grip of a vise ; comes to the place from which he is going back anyhow in spite of all you can say to him or do for him : what, pray, is all that past experience to such a man ? If he will go back to Egypt, if he has only the ambition of a brickmaker, if he would rather feel the smart of the master's whip than to endure suspense and danger in the hope of a larger liberty, would rather suffer the debasement of a slave than toil for the manhood which is due to man; then, why should the Almighty display himself in his delivery? Why should pillar of fire and cloud go before him? Why should water burst from the rock or manna fall from heaven for such as he ? Miracles are wrought ! Yes ! But they are wrought only for the Sons of God. Glory is due to encompass those alone who have glory in view. 200 What a picture-gallery of history these cowards of Kadesh-barnea looked back into! What race or nation can turn to a record of more thrilling pages ? But these cowards ! They had learned no lesson of courage. They had gained no increase of confidence in God. They had not yet learned, after all this wonderful teaching, that no future could ever be darker than their past had been. And here the craven ones were turning their faces to- wards the wilderness to die ingloriously, when the very land was in their view, when its fruits fresh and beautiful had greeted their eyes. Their purposes were abandoned, and their experience thrown, so to speak, on the ash-heap. (3) Their deliverers moved daily among them though they were blind to the fact. Moving among them all these forty years were Caleb and Joshua, the men who should lead their children to final conquest. But in a panic-fear like Kadesh-barnea, a man does not seem to have sense enough to know that, if he is ever to go on, it must be because of forces within himself. A great many men, in their discouragement, think their help is to come from somebody else. But it is to come from themselves. A man can be helped most effectually by himself. Outside help of my sort tends to pauperize a man. His real help is in himself. It is he who must assume the burdens, he who must face the dangers, he who must shoulder the responsibility. Not all the money in the world can carry a man over into the land of promise. All his friends may martial their forces, but they cannot, in combination, do certain things which shall be called his success. But there is a Caleb and a Joshua in every man. There is an inward voice which cries, "We are well able to go up and possess it." There are certain forces in every 201 man which can face danger, which do have fight in them, which do not know when they are beaten. But at Kad- esh-barnea this struggling minority of our better nature is killed by the voice of cowardice and the circumstances that easily breed cowardice. Be careful then how you give way to a temporary discouragement. You did take up a purpose for your- self. Be careful how you surrender it. It may be hum- ble, but the fact that you have espoused it makes it hon- orable. One of the wealthy young Vanderbilts, a few years ago, took a course in railroading. One of the sons of the president is learning to manufacture carpets. Such a choice brings honor to the man and not to the profes- sion. A man's calling is the land of his dreams. It is his Holy Land, if he pushes on into it and discourage- ments do not turn him back. Until his vision opens upon a larger one, it is for him, "a good land and a large, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills ; a land of wheat and barley, and vines, and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of oil olive and honey." And yet it is a land of whose fruits only the willing and obedient shall eat. Be careful how you throw away that past in which already the hand of God has been bared for your deliver- ance. For every earnest man, miracles are wrought. For him the Red Sea waves divide. For him the bitter waters are made sweet. For him the manna falls. Not from the chapters of the Bible only, but from the book of our own experience also, may we read the hand of God's deliverance. Should we then turn back ? Nay rather, let us, with unyielding faith in God, allow the better forces that are within us to keep on and work out their own way. Kadesh-barnea. A crisis. It may come any day, 202 any hour. Shall we turn back to slavery or push on to freedom ? Shall we be slaves to sin or freemen in Christ ? Shall we think that we are the victims of the universe or shall we make the universe itself the victim to our higher wish? Shall we not obey God? Shall we not push on for God's land ? Shall there not blossom out and perfect itself in us that larger life and wish which to us is even more possible than to any generation of individuals pre- ceding us ? Delivered in the Auditorium, November 15, 1908. XVII. SOME PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF A BELIEF IN THE FUTURE LIFE "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord." I Cor. 15:58. Believing, as I do, that life is the most precious of all God's gifts, believing that it grows more precious the longer we live it, believing furthermore that none of us can live it any too well, I am offering some hints to you on this subject which I have already found helpful to my- self. Supposing that the argument of St. Paul is true, then three things, at least, may be inferred from it : all the emphasis of life is to be put upon the present ; the future life is not a thing to be too much dwelt upon ; and man's highest development can be secured only as we obey these two previous questions. 203 In a general way, we are taught to believe that the emphasis of life is to be laid upon the present day, the present hour, and the present fact. "Now is the accepted time, behold now is the day of salvation." "Trust no future however pleasant ; Let the dead past bury its dead ; Act, act in the living present." "To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill." And furthermore if our souls are made in the image of God then surely to lay emphasis on the present is the soundest advice for us, for with God all is present. He can have no past, no future. His work goes ever on, for- ever finished forever unfinished, a constant miracle. Every morning do the stars sing together as at creation's birth. God's redeeming work goes on just the same as when the angels sang at Bethlehem. What can you point to in God's universe and say of it: "That is old, outworn, passed its prime"? The mountains yonder are in their youth as when they first were reared. The waves break ceaselessly on all the coasts of all the continents, forever advancing and for- ever retreating as they have for thousands of years and will for other thousands. They are unwearied, as is the sun in his course rejoicing as a strong man to run a race. God has no attic, so to speak, where He throws aside the cast-off things of His former doing. No unseemly scrap pile disgraces His universe. The old is blended with the new in constant flux and as it dies it lives again, as it is worn out and ready for rejection it is reabsorbed and helps to remake the glorious whole. Nothing is old with God. To lay emphasis on the present is in accord with the very instincts of our souls. The manner in which we discard things is worthy of careful notice. And the more human activities increase the more is this true. The more 204. alert the soul becomes to know itself, the more will it be true. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers wore a broadcloth suit for years, and think of the "wonderful one horse shay." We are impatient of last year's suit, or a last year's bicycle, or a last year's book. It is not that we turn our backs upon Homer and Virgil. We do the same to Milton and Shakespeare; we are doing the same to Dickens and Thackeray, and soon we shall to Mrs. Hum- phrey Ward. We are not satisfied with our sciences as taught by the old pioneers, nor with the methods of teach- ing handed down to :us from Pestalozzi or Thomas Arnold. We want to be permitted to see nature with our own eyes and to instruct according to present necessities. This is instinctive in us. We do not want some theologian of the middle ages to tell us how we are to worship or what we are to believe. We are impatient of the formularies of Augustine and Luther, of Calvin and Wesley. No man may now say to us, "Believe as I do at the peril of your souls," because we do not believe that any man is given the power to imperil our souls. And so we follow the instinct of Jesus who read nature directly and not through the schools. We prefer the natural glow- ing language of Paul rather than the dry theology of the school of Gamaliel. There is a naturalness of individu- ality, of the mood, of the hour, in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John that will always make them enjoyable. It is the man who is thus absorbed in the present who appeals to us, who can write well, and speak well, and carry us with him. "I must do the works of Him that sent me while it is day," said the greatest of all men. And his greatest apostle declared, "I am will- ing to spend and be spent for you." 205 The gift of eternal life brings with it also this same emphasis. Immortality and eternal life are, doubtless, not one and the same thing. Immortality seems to be a part of our original endowment as human beings. Eternal life is the special gift of Jesus Christ, given to those who follow Him, who pattern after, who trust Him. When one attains for the first time the true con- sciousness of eternal life, everything takes on a different, look and a new value. A moral meaning is seen to un- derlie everything. The universe is seen to be a sublime opportunity which confronts the soul. The soul comes to know God as the source and giver of all spiritual power. It comes to know the value of soul upon soul. In other words it comes to know the highest values that are connected with life and living. It knows that it must use the passing moment and the passing fact as a leverage to higher things. This general statement needs guarding, however. I would not have you to understand that we must wholly ignore the past and the future. No man can, with truth to himself, live confined to any one of these periods of time. For to live wholly in the past is to be a pedant ; to live wholly in the future is to be a visionary; to live wholly in the present is to be shallow and ineffective. The only abiding actions are those that have reference to all time and that is as true of the actions of men as of God. I might illustrate what I mean in this way: The last work designed by Mr. White, of the McKim, Mead, and White Company, is a bank building in Philadelphia. It is in Roman style and finished in costly marble. It leaves upon the beholder a sense of sublimity, of dura- bility. The directors of that bank might have surround- 206 ed their vaults with four plain walls covered in simply as a shield from the weather. That would have served the present use without any reference to the past or to the future. But who would have cared to look at such a bank ? It is because the architect allowed his remarkable genius to work upon a past rich in examples that he wrought out, with modern adaptabilities and conveniences, a structure worthy to stand for a thousand years. And just there is where true genius is seen in any of the arts or in literature. It is the power to range over all time and over all nature, and to take it all in, molding it and fashioning it by the hand of a present genius. So the Parthenon was reared, so Hamlet and Macbeth were written, so the Bible grows out of the hearts of men. What reverence for the beliefs of the past are carried through its pages for two thousand years and more, only to assure us that the reverence thus continued shall of necessity still continue. My second thought is, that the future life is not a subject to be too much dwelt upon. As things are constituted, we have no means of get- ting at the subject satisfactorily. Our friends do not rise from the dead and come back to us. If they could do so, it is a question whether that other life would not lose all the moral value it now has. And even if now and then a man could rise from the dead, his doing so would satisfy the curiosity of only a limited locality, and, then, not very long. Furthermore, very little is said on the subject in the Bible. Some declare there is no men- tion made of it in the Old Testament. In the New Tes- tament we have the few mysterious words of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus ; we have St. Paul's eloquent argument in this chapter, with a few touches in one or two other 207 letters; but there is no treatment of the subject exhaust- ively. There is a marked difference in this respect be- tween the Hebrews on the one side and such people as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans on the other. The Egyptians emphasized immortality to such a de- gree that it filled nearly the entire circle of their religious thinking. They developed the strange doctrine of trans- migration. They embalmed the body that the soul, after long periods of changes through other bodies, might come back and find its former body preserved for occupation. Of necessity they were obliged to reverence all grades of animal life and gradually to deify it, until there sprang up idolatry in most revolting forms. This was all in con- sequence of their views of the future life. Moses, being learned in all the wisdoms of the Egypt- ians, when he came to legislate for the Hebrews, shut the door on all this. He taught the Hebrews to believe in one living, eternal, unseen God. This opened up a spirit world with spiritual intelligences, to whom man is allied by nature, being made in the image of God. Being alive, man not only lives now but will, supposedly, live on. The goodness and mercy that follow him all the days of his life shall cause him to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Indeed, viewed from this standpoint, I think that it will be found that the Old Testament is shot through and through with the idea that the life we now live is of indefinite continuance. Being in the image ot God, being Sons of God, being commanded to love Him with all our heart, soul, and might, is a proof that we are permanent and enduring members of His family and that our longings for length of life and for perfection of life will be satisfied. The Greeks and Romans had no such basis of belief, and therefore men like Socrates and, later, 208 vo